# Cloud: the power shift nobody expected Cloud is amazing—if you’re a tech person. For everyone else, it’s confusing, disempowering, and often expensive. From a **technical point of view**, cloud is a revolution. You can spin up thousands of servers in minutes, run an experiment, and shut them down before the coffee gets cold. That kind of flexibility was unthinkable ten years ago. But from a **business perspective**, cloud feels like chaos. Procurement teams lost their leverage—there are no big hardware contracts to negotiate anymore. The deals are hidden inside APIs, not spreadsheets. Finance lost its foresight—costs appear *after* the money is spent, and asking “will it be the same next month?” only gets you the classic cloud answer: *“it depends.”* And for engineers? They gained power, but also all the responsibility that used to be spread across other functions—security, capacity, maintenance, compliance, forecasting. It’s all on them now. Cloud shifted power. It didn’t just change technology—it rewired how organisations work. --- ## Why it still costs a lot (even when it shouldn’t) People often complain that cloud is expensive. It can be—but only if you use it *like a data centre*. When you compare on-premise to cloud, you need to remember that your old cost models ignored half the real costs. Nobody included server warranties, cabling, power, cooling, network operations, audits, or the people maintaining all of it. All of that has now been *outsourced* to the cloud provider—and built into your bill. So yes, it looks like you’re paying more. But you’re also paying for things you used to ignore. The problem isn’t cost. The problem is **how you think about cost**. --- ## A story about payroll Imagine your company’s payroll system. It takes five days to process salaries because you only have three servers. To make that work, you have to lock the system a week before payday. People’s holiday requests and sick days get stuck in a backlog. What if you could cut that to *one hour*? In the old world, you’d need to buy a thousand servers—madness for something that runs once a month. But in the cloud, you *can* have a thousand servers for one hour. That’s the magic. That’s the mindset shift. Cloud lets you collapse time. What used to take a week can take an hour. But only if you stop thinking like a data centre operator and start thinking like a designer of dynamic systems. --- ## The trap: rebuilding the data centre in the cloud Unfortunately, many companies take **this path**. They rebuild their data centre *on top of* the cloud. They build internal tools that wrap the cloud’s APIs in bureaucracy—request tickets, approvals, and custom consoles that remove the very features that make cloud powerful. It feels safer. It feels familiar. But it’s an illusion of control. The result? Nobody wins. - **Engineers** lose flexibility—they’re forced to work through layers of internal red tape, waiting for approvals that add no value. - **Procurement** still can’t negotiate—there’s no hardware contract to discuss, no volume deal to rework, no supplier to pressure. The “contract” is code, and it’s invisible. - **Finance** still can’t predict—the costs arrive too late, the models never align, and the invoice still looks like a foreign language. - **Business leaders** still can’t steer—spend and performance move independently, and cloud value remains locked behind technical jargon. In other words, the control that everyone wanted to get back never returns. You’ve recreated all the friction of the data centre without restoring any of its governance. The same cost problems, the same coordination problems, the same sense of opacity—just running on newer hardware. If you’re going to do that, you might as well stay on-prem. At least there, procurement can negotiate, finance can forecast, and engineers know the limits. The middle ground—pretending cloud is a data centre—is the worst of both worlds. --- ## The way forward If you have the budget to build your own “internal cloud console,” don’t. Use that budget to build **FinOps practices**. Train your people. Build shared visibility. Create *understanding*, not abstraction. The cloud gives you a blank canvas. The mistake is to repaint the old walls on it.