I used to work at a very large financial publishing company.

I joined just at the point where they were moving from VMware to AWS.

It was never a cost saving exercise. It was a way to completely change the culture of the IT department. As they were one of the very first news websites, they had at the time ~18 years of cruft to deal with.

The drive to the cloud was about flexibility, and if we are honest, shaking the staffing tree to get rid of the ossified staff.

They went from three data centres (mixture of SUN and Intel blades all backed by FC) to pure AWS/heroku. The running costs went up significantly, the opex was close to £3mil in AWS bills alone, all to put text on a web page.

It will continue to rise because it offers flexibility, and as each product now has its own account, standards are difficult to enforce. This means lots of snowflake installs of X that are now critical to Y.

The cloud is more expensive for large companies, for most workloads. For SMEs its the total opposite.