Ask The Experts: The Cloud Cost Reckoning
InformationWeek, Wednesday, February 4th, 2026
At what point did cloud computing stop being cheaper -- and why did you stay, anyway?
The modern commercial cloud turns 20 in 2026, dating back to the launch of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service.
But for many CIOs, the anniversary feels less like a cause for celebration and more like a financial reckoning. Escalating cloud costs have undercut one of cloud computing's earliest promises: that it would be cheaper than running workloads in corporate data centers.