Most of the time, management is looking for the next “silver bullet” that is going to magically solve all their problems. They will latch onto the latest marketing gimmick and run with it despite having no understanding of how the “silver bullet” works or the impact it will have on their business. A decade and a half ago it was “the cloud”. Now It’s “AI”.

Are there advantages to “hosted solutions” AKA “the cloud” AKA renting someone else’s data center? Sure there are. For example, It’s great for small businesses who need enterprise grade technology but can’t afford their own data center. Cloud providers also offer services and scale that would be very difficult and costly to build out in your own data center(s).

But is it cheaper all the time? The answer to that is a definite “No”. Like most other business decisions it’s situational and there are a lot of facets that impact the cost. In my experience, one downside to hosted solutions is that it’s very easy to make architectural errors that have high costs and no one notices until accounting is on the phone wanting to know why the Azure bill doubled over the last month and “Whoops!” Is not really a satisfactory answer.