Treating Cloud as a Product Creates Cost and Security Gaps?

Cloud computing is often discussed as a product decision. In practice, it behaves much more like a design discipline. When teams treat cloud as something they “buy” rather than something they architect, we see predictable outcomes, cost overruns, security gaps, and brittle systems that don’t scale as expected. Platforms like Azure or AWS abstract infrastructure complexity, but they don’t remove architectural responsibility. Design choices around identity, data movement, workload isolation, and governance still define long-term success.

Curious to hear from others here: where do you see teams misunderstanding cloud the most, cost, security, or operations?