I've mentioned it before and will again: AWS spent a decade openly and privately advertising how much "cheaper" the cloud was. How economies of sclae meant you'd save boatloads of money. Except, it was never true. You will potentially save money if you're just starting out and have no idea if your idea will be successful. A massive capital outlay is difficult and stupid at that point. You will also potentially save money if the tool you use to make money is something you can easily scale up and down, and actually DOES scale up and down. IE: I host a fantasy football stats app and every Monday night, Thursday night, and all day Sunday I've got millions of users, and thousands the rest of the week.

If you don't meet those criteria, unless you are absolutely horrible at negotiating with your vendors, you aren't saving money going into the cloud. I don't care that "datacenters are expensive to build". If you are large enough to need to build your own datacenter instead of renting floorspace for pennies on the dollar from Switch or Equinix (although Equinix is kind of pricey) or Windstream or insert provider - then the datacenter is a rounding error in your 10-year IT budget.

The problem is "I moved company XYZ to the cloud" is now a requirement for an IT exec to show up to the country club on Saturday. So whether it makes any fiscal sense at all, the board wants to know "what our cloud plans are" and most execs are more than happy to oblige in order to pad that resume. In my experience, most of them leave long before the bill comes due, and people start asking why the IT budget quadrupled in 3 years. The best part is, most of these companies can't pass along that increased cost to end-customers like a Netflix can because they aren't actually making money on the apps they're hosting in the cloud, those are all internal business facing apps.