This video walks through a real cloud migration that tripled a company's operating costs overnight. A midsize logistics firm left a stable $15,000 a month on-prem system for Azure after being sold the classic promise of flexibility, scalability, and lower cost. The project cost $180,000 to migrate, then hit them with a $45,000 monthly bill because they lifted and shifted every inefficiency into a pay as you go model. Oversized VMs, always on environments, unmanaged backups, and the lack of automation created an extra $360,000 a year in wasted spend.

By year three, the total cost of ownership ballooned past $2 million, compared to the half-million they would have spent by staying put. The cloud was never the problem. The strategy was. Lift and shift is a sales tactic, not a solution. Cloud only works when architecture, governance, automation, and in-house maturity are in place. Otherwise it becomes the most expensive way to run the exact same problems you already had.