Small businesses need to weigh the cost of cloud services against the certainty and predictability of owning even slightly dated equipment. For many, the cloud’s principal value lies in handling variable workloads, disaster recovery, or collaboration services where investing in on-prem hardware doesn’t make sense. However, businesses should be wary of cloud vendor lock-in and the ever-increasing operational costs that come with scaling workloads in the public cloud. An honest, recurring evaluation to compare the total cost of ownership for private hardware versus the cloud remains essential, especially as prices continue to shift.
Large enterprises are not immune to these dynamics. They may be courted with enterprise agreements and incentivized pricing, but the economic calculus has shifted. The cloud is rarely as cheap as initially promised, especially at scale. Organizations should take a hybrid approach, keeping core workloads and sensitive data on owned infrastructure where possible and using the cloud for test environments, rapid scaling, or global delivery when justified by business needs.
A path forward in a tight market
The industry must recognize that cloud providers’ pursuit of AI workloads is a double-edged sword: Their innovation and scale are remarkable, but their market power carries responsibility. Providers need to be transparent about the downstream effects of their hardware consumption. More importantly, they must resist the urge to push the narrative that the cloud is the only viable future for everyday computing, especially when that future has been shaped, in part, by their own hands.
