IT Myths: The Cloud Fixes Everything (Until It Doesn’t)

20 October 2025

The myth

“Move to the cloud and everything just works.” Fewer outages, lower costs, instant scale, security by default. Buy the services, tick the boxes, get the benefits.

The reality

Many teams are tired. Costs creep. Tooling multiplies. Ownership blurs. The big promise turns into a backlog of migrations, refactors, dashboards and bills that no one quite trusts. That is cloud fatigue.

Cloud fatigue is the burnout that follows years of ad hoc adoption without a strong operating model. It is not a technology problem. It is a way-of-working problem.

Common pitfalls in SMBs

No clear service ownership. If “the platform team” owns everything, no one owns anything. Without named owners you get weak SLOs, weak change control and weak CSI.
Migrate first, think later. Lift and shift increases spend and complexity. Without modernisation, the cloud is just someone else’s data centre at London prices.
Vendor and pattern drift. Each team chooses different stacks. Standard work is impossible. Support is slower. Costs go up.
Cost theatre. Dashboards, not decisions. FinOps becomes a monthly slide instead of a weekly habit in delivery.
Shallow observability. Logs everywhere, insight nowhere. You cannot improve what you cannot see end to end.

The impact

Innovation slows. Incidents take longer to diagnose. People burn out. Finance loses confidence in forecasts. Leadership stops believing the cloud story. When multiple businesses share the same cloud infrastructure, a single provider fault can ripple through hundreds of customers at once — as seen during large-scale AWS outages. Worst case, public cloud quietly becomes the new legacy, with sticky bespoke integrations and rising technical debt.

What good looks like

Service ownership. Every service has a named owner, SLOs, a runbook and a roadmap. Ownership outlives org charts.
Standard patterns. A small set of blessed architectures with a paved road. New work follows the path of least resistance, and that path is the right one.
Real FinOps. Cost is a quality attribute. Engineers see cost feedback next to performance and error rates. Teams review savings weekly and make changes now, not next quarter.
Observability. Traces, metrics and logs tied to user journeys and SLOs. You can answer “what broke, where and who is affected” in minutes.
Vendor hygiene. Fewer platforms, deeper expertise. Contracts map to outcomes, not features.

The fix

Rationalise and commit to a paved road. Pick a small number of platform patterns that fit most use cases. Lock them. Document them. Automate the golden path. Put friction on everything else.

Put names on services. Publish an owner for each service. Owners sign up to SLOs, change control, security posture and cost. Rotate support fairly. Make work visible with a service catalogue.

Make cost part of engineering. Tag everything. Show real time unit costs in dashboards engineers already use. Track a small set of cost KPIs per service. Review weekly. Ship the savings.

Quick wins checklist

✅ Consolidate to a short list of platform patterns and archive unused ones.
✅ Add owners, SLOs and runbooks to the top ten customer facing services first.
✅ Turn on tagging by default and block deploys without tags.
✅ Put cost, error rate and latency on the same team dashboard.
✅ Review the top three recurring incidents monthly and fix one root cause each time.

Bottom line

Cloud fatigue is not a failed cloud. It is a signal that ownership, patterns and feedback loops are weak. Do fewer things. Do them well. Measure outcomes weekly.