Ok, who let the C'level out of his cage? Quick, convene a meeting about meetings and distract him with new synergistic products that mesh the work output of the teams into a new daily reporting product with shiny graphs for him to make informed decisions about, preferably by proposing an "cloud only" data scientist.
But seriously. This comment alone shows this person doesn't have a clue wtf they are talking about. If your guys were so focused on manual config that was a management problem, and isn't an inherent fact about the current state of data centers. So you decided to move data centers, you just moved the jobs somewhere else, to the new provider (Let me guess, amazon, microsoft, or google...)
Say it with me: "There is no such thing as "the cloud"."; Say it again: "There is no such thing as "the cloud"."
Your shit still runs on servers, that at the end of the day someone manages the systems of. So they manage the systems at a lower level that is transparent to you as the modern datacenter is able to hotload blocks, devices, vm's, containers, etc across a swath of machines, clusters, etc.
At the end of the day, you made a business decision that decided managing your own on prem wasn't for you. For some companies, that can be the right strategic move, but as the salty ol bofh who has seen it happen, it's not all puppy dogs and rainbows and there are many pros and many cons to such a move... with "the boss" usually completely underestimating the cons.
Next up: the boss asks how to ease the transition of the low level programmers because he's hiring a new wave of nodejs/meanstack devs because "there's so many of them he can pay them less than the greybeards" and "they are young and know all the cool new devops agile cloud cycle methodologies" and "c++ is dying".
Whatever f50 this is I'd longshort the fuck out of it. I bet it's in a downslide for other reasons and IT is the easy dept to squeeze politically while ignoring the root causal issues that are probably management related.
tldr; Data centers aren't going anywhere, your shit still runs on servers, people still design build and rack boxen, design, fine tune, and diagnose networks, munge and wrangle data, etc, etc, and the skills they have are still in high demand the world over. Disagree? Tell me how many data centers as a percentage that have fully automated robotized racking?