Turns Out the Cloud Isn't The Cost Savings It Was Sold As

From Ars Technica: Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years

This isn't the first time some company has figured that out.

37Signals is a "productivity company." They had been heavily involved in Apple and the Mac, until Apple decided that only THEIR apps would be allowed on the home page, because how dare you question Apple! So 37Signals moved to Windows, or started to, until Apple saw the error of their way and relented. A little. None of that was done quietly, which is why Apple may have relented. (Bad Publicity can affect anyone.)

So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps.

I could probably come up with a couple of other examples. But we have The Cloud™ to consider.

AWS made data transfer out of AWS free for customers who were moving off their servers in March, spurred in part by European regulations. Trade publications are full of trend stories about rising cloud costs and explainers on why companies are repatriating. Stories of major players' cloud reversals, like that of Dropbox, have become talking points for the cloud-averse.

Click thru for the details.

And that doesn't include the fact that you give up 4th Amendment rights for anything you let other people manage.

Companies, or rather executives, for reasons I never could quite figure out, resent the money they spend on information technology, and information security, and computers in general. Computers run their customer service, their manufacturing, their financial analysis, logistics, etc. Everything a company does today, is touched by computers in some way. But they don't want to pay for the support they need. (Look at the aftermath report of every ransomware attack in the past 7 or 8 years, and what is done after the fact.) They really don't want internal people telling them how they are screwing up. They would rather have outside contractors who don't have their best interests at heart. (There is another profit stream involved.) In the 1990s is was outsourcing. Today it is the cloud.

For the older generations of executives, you could say that they didn't understand the impact of computers, but can you say that in 2024?