Unpacking the basics: the cloud.

In the first two parts of our “unpacking the basics” series, we looked at digital transformation and the human side of change management. Now, we need to look at where all this actually happens… the cloud.

If you ask most business leaders where their data lives or where their applications run, they will vaguely gesture upwards and say, “It’s in the cloud.” And despite Amazong Web Services launching their cloud services all the way back in 2006, businesses still use it as a key selling point of the products and services — let’s move everything to the cloud, they say!

The cloud has become the default answer for everything IT-related. But despite being a term we use every day, “the cloud” is often misunderstood. Is it just a hard drive in the sky? Is it just about saving money on servers? And what does it mean to be “cloud native”?

If you are embarking on a digital transformation, knowing the difference between simply using the cloud and being built for the cloud can be the difference between a successful platform and a very expensive monthly bill.

Let’s unpack it.

There is no cloud.

There is an old joke in the IT industry: “There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.”

It’s cynical, but it’s true. When you move to the cloud, you are essentially renting computing power and storage from massive data centres run by giants like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure) or Google (GCP).

In the old days (the “on-premise” era), if you wanted to run a business application, you had to buy a physical server, stick it in a cool room in your office, wire it up and pay someone to fix it when the fan broke. It was expensive, rigid, slow to upgrade and the System Administrator was usually a bit weird and you did what you could to avoid talking to them.

The cloud changed that. It allowed businesses to rent server space instantly. No hardware to buy, no fans to fix.

However, this convenience led to a common trap.

Lifting and shifting.

When the cloud first became popular, many businesses took their existing, clunky, old-school apps and simply moved them from their office server to a cloud server.

This is called a “lift and shift”.

Imagine you are moving house. Instead of decluttering, organising and packing your boxes neatly, you pick up the contents of your entire home as is, put it on a truck and dump it all on a new block of land.

Yes, you have moved. You are in a new location. But the house is still messy, the layout still doesn’t work and the plumbing is still leaking. You’ve just moved the problem to a more expensive neighbourhood.

This is where many businesses get stuck. They treat the cloud like a data centre. They are technically “in the cloud”, but they aren’t seeing any of the benefits like speed, agility or cost savings. In fact, running a messy old app in the cloud can often cost more than running it in your own office.

To get the real value, you need to stop thinking about location and start thinking about architecture. You need to be cloud native.

What is cloud native?

Being cloud native means building your applications specifically to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the cloud.

The old way of building software was monolothic — typically one giant block of code where everything is stuck together.

If you are cloud native, instead of one big block of code, your application is made up of hundreds of small, independent pieces that talk to each other. If you want to upgrade a feature, you can do it instantly without touching the rest of the structure. If one part breaks, the rest of the application stays standing. This approach gives you speed, safety and the ability to change things on the fly without crashing your entire business.

Why does this matter for your business?

You might be thinking this is all a minor technical detail for your architects or developers to worry about. But the decision to go cloud native has huge business implications. There are three core considerations:

1. Speed to market: With a cloud native approach, your developers can update and improve small parts of your system every single day without breaking the whole thing. You can release new features to customers in days, not months.

2. Scalability — and cost: This is the big one. In the old world, if you expected a busy period (like Black Friday), you had to buy enough servers to handle the peak traffic. For the rest of the year, those servers sat idle, wasting money. Cloud native apps are elastic. They automatically scale up when traffic spikes, and scale down when it’s quiet. You only pay for what you use.

3. Resilience: If one part breaks (for example, the “search” function stops working), the rest of the application keeps running. Your customers can still log in and buy things. In a monolithic app, a single error could crash the entire system.

In summary.

Moving to the cloud is a journey.

To truly unlock the power of the cloud — to be faster, more resilient and more cost-effective — you need to look at how your systems are built. It might require more investment upfront to re-architect your platforms, but the long-term agility it gives your business is worth its weight in gold.

Are you paying high cloud bills for systems that still feel slow and clunky? You might need a cloud native strategy. We are Google Cloud Digital Leader certified — Get in touch today.