From the get-go, the cloud promised to help companies scale up their architectures in seconds, run their applications faster, never turn away a transaction, and save money through economies of scale. How could any CIO or application manager resist the call to the cloud when companies started sharing the huge successes they were having with their migrations and overall digital transformations?
Now, more than a decade later, business leaders recognize the advantages the cloud offers but are struggling with bloated cloud costs. Andreesen Horowitz coined the phrase the Cloud Paradox in a 2021 article, which posits that the pressure the cloud puts on company margins can start to outweigh the benefits over time.