Let us re-think the Cloud strategy

Businesses may find themselves trapped in the cloud and soon realise that cloud-hopping is not exactly like pub-hopping or changing lanes

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

Watching 'The Menu' movie feels eerie from the very first scene. Despite the red-carpet welcome, the meticulous arrangements, the air of exclusivity, the suave staff, and the company of high society, something is off in that elegant island. The guests are supposed to be treated to a specially crafted many-course haute cuisine by a coveted chef. And amidst well-marinated satire, dark humour, and mind-shaking epiphanies, what follows is unexpected turbulence, knives not meant for slicing food, blood gushing out between fancily-plated gourmet plates and a suffocating sense of, well, being locked in.

Guests try to run, to break windows, to scream, to throw tantrums - but nothing helps. Unless a girl, who was never supposed to be on this special list, does something obvious and unexpected. And she gets to get out. Exactly how? We will come to that in a bit.

But it is an attempt that some enterprises also seem to opt for due to indigestion from the Cloud buffet they opted for. They are trying everything: repatriation, hybridisation, scale-back, right-sizing, moving to special-purpose hardware or infrastructure optimisation. It can be due to unexpected shocks of Cloud economics, hidden Cloud bills that were not visible before, indirect breathlessness due to vendor lock-in or some data control and sovereignty issue.

WHEN DOES IT FEEL 'NOT RIGHT'

Let us start with the why. And what better way than to read what David Heinemeier Hansson, Co-founder and CTO of 37signals wrote in a 2022 post? In "Why we are leaving the Cloud." he argued that Basecamp had one foot in the Cloud for well over a decade, and Hey has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago.