Everything changes when you move to the cloud: the way you provision infrastructure, the way you create services and applications, the way you can blend together multiple sources for the purposes of data mining and analytics.

And, of course, the way you pay for your IT services. In the early days of cloud, consumption-based billing was presented as a way of reducing overall budgets. So, the theory went, scrapping redundant and unused servers and storage and paying only for what you use should bring overall spending down. It doesn’t always work out that way.