There are many studies that talk about the economies of scale associated to cloud storage that make it so cheap. Yet oil and gas companies managing petabytes of seismic data are not jumping on the cloud storage bandwagon. In this talk, I'll explore why moving petabytes of seismic data to the cloud is difficult. I'll share some of the true costs of managing large data sets in the cloud and why it doesn't add significant business value. In the same way that lifting and shifting legacy tools and services to the cloud yields little value, moving seismic data to the cloud also yields little value. It isn't until applications, workflows and even the data storage formats are re-engineered that real business value and even cost saving can be found. I'll explore how this is possible today with open file formats.