What is an organization responsible for when migrating from on-premises to the cloud?

The cloud provider, not the customer, is responsible for covering costs associated with downtime of cloud services under the provider's service level agreements.

Underlying physical network infrastructure, including hardware, cabling, and data center networking, is managed entirely by the cloud provider under the shared responsibility model.

Cloud adoption fundamentally changes how organizations consume and pay for IT resources, requiring them to transition from large upfront hardware purchases (CapEx) to a consumption-based, pay-as-you-go model (OpEx). Organizations must adapt their budgeting, procurement, and financial governance processes to account for variable, usage-driven costs. This shift in expenditure responsibility remains with the organization even as technical infrastructure duties move to the cloud provider.

Optimizing cloud storage systems at the infrastructure level is a responsibility of the cloud provider; customers are responsible for their data and configuration choices, not the underlying storage hardware.