Talking about cloud today is no longer about a technological trend, but about a central piece of the business. More and more companies are moving their infrastructure to cloud providers under the promise of less hardware, less maintenance, fewer licenses and less time spent on activities that do not generate value.

Much of that promise has been fulfilled. Cloud has democratized capabilities that only large organizations could access a few years ago. Launching a service, increasing capacity or deploying a new region is now easier, faster and more accessible.

However, as often happens with technology, the story changes when we zoom into operations. Cloud simplifies infrastructure, but it does not always simplify how that infrastructure is operated. And that nuance affects not only technical teams, but also the business itself.

Cloud providers don’t sell “solutions” — they sell components

The first point of friction does not appear in compute or storage, but in the services that accompany the infrastructure. This includes security, load balancing, TLS certificates, application firewalls, monitoring and observability.

In the cloud provider’s catalog, the technology is there, but it is sold as separate components. Security on one side, certificates on another, observability on another, and advanced capabilities billed as add-ons. The customer does not go without service, but is left with a recurring question: what exactly must be purchased to remain protected and operate reliably?

A less visible aspect also emerges: security is billed per event, per inspection or per volume of traffic. What used to be a hardware expense becomes a bill based on requests, analysis and certificates. Cloud solved hardware, but externalized the operational complexity of security.

Metrics and logs exist, but they are often fragmented, sampled and weakly correlated. Understanding what happened during an incident may require navigating multiple services and data models. Cloud promises security, but it rarely promises explanations.

And at its core this is not a technical problem, but a model problem. Cloud security is commercialized as a product but consumed as a service. And when there is a mismatch between how something is purchased and how it is used, friction eventually appears.

SkudoCloud as an example of the managed approach

This is the context in which SkudoCloud emerges — not to replace the cloud provider or compete as infrastructure, but to resolve the operational coherence between load balancing, security and visibility.

SkudoCloud is a SaaS platform that enables companies to deploy advanced load balancing and application protection without assembling separate modules, tools or services. From a single interface, organizations can:

  • manage SSL/TLS certificates
  • inspect encrypted traffic
  • apply WAF rules
  • distribute load across backends
  • and monitor application behavior

The most evident difference appears in security. In the modular cloud model, the customer must decide what to purchase, which rules to enable, how to correlate logs and how to keep everything updated. In a managed model like SkudoCloud, certificates, WAF, TLS inspection and load balancing behave as one coherent system.

This has direct consequences for the business:

  • it reduces operational uncertainty
  • it improves visibility during incidents
  • and it avoids billing models tied to traffic volume or number of inspections

Instead of acquiring security, companies acquire operability. Instead of assembling components, they obtain an outcome. That is the difference of a managed approach.

Conclusion

Cloud adoption is already a given. The real question now is how to operate it sustainably. Fragmentation was a natural side effect of the migration phase. Unification will likely be the central theme of the operational phase.

Cloud simplified servers. Now it is time to simplify operations.