IT Myths: Cloud always saves money

30 September 2025

The myth

“Just move it to the cloud. It’ll be cheaper.” For years, the cloud has been sold as a guaranteed saving. No big upfront costs, only pay for what you use, and scale down when it’s quiet.

The reality

Cloud can save money, but only when it’s planned and managed. What usually goes wrong:

Lift-and-shift without optimisation. Oversized servers and idle apps get moved as-is and stay expensive.
Sprawl. Dev/test environments run 24/7, snapshots multiply, and storage grows without anyone noticing.
Low visibility. Invoices are noisy. Without tagging and reporting, you cannot see where spend comes from.

Cloud isn’t inherently cheap. It’s elastic. That elasticity is powerful, but without discipline it makes costs unpredictable.

The fix

Right-size. Match resources to demand. Use autoscaling and smaller instances instead of copying on‑prem specs.
Use native services. Prefer managed databases, serverless and storage tiers over always-on VMs.
FinOps mindset. Make cost a daily metric. Tag everything, review spend weekly, and hold owners accountable.
Turn things off. Shut down non-production out of hours. Delete unused snapshots and old object versions.

Quick wins checklist

✅ Tag by owner, environment and application.
✅ Set budgets and alerts for each team or workload.
✅ Rightsize the top 3 most expensive instances first.
✅ Enable lifecycle policies for storage (move cold data to cheaper tiers).
✅ Schedule dev/test to stop outside working hours.

Common pitfalls

Buying reserved capacity without understanding actual usage.
Letting every team spin up resources with no guardrails.
Treating cloud review as a quarterly task instead of weekly hygiene.

Bottom line

Cloud can be cost‑effective, but it is not automatic. The businesses that save treat it as a new operating model, not just another hosting bill.