This cloud-for-everything-even-local-devices thing is both hilarious and sad.
I wonder if anyone had trouble doing their dishes or laundry today, because I'm sure someone thought dish washers and washing machines needed cloud.
also, building access systems should be hosted in the building they reside in for security reasons anyways.
Depending on the cloud is certainly a very stupid decision. keeping everything inside the building is better, but still not ideal.
Cloud-based badges make sense if you have locations with small staffs and no HR people or managers. Like if you're controlling access to a microwave tower on the top of a mountain.
But badges-in-the-cloud for an office building full of people who are being supervised by supposedly trusted managers, and all of whom has been vetted for security and by HR, is just being cheap.
Like the 1980's AT&T commercials used to say: "You get what you pay for."
I'm not convinced that's true, or at least certainly not an order of magnitude. Wouldn't a badge system hosted on-prem also need a user management system (database), a hosted management interface, have a dependency on the LAN, and need most of the same hardware? Such a system would also need to be running on a local server(s), which introduces points of failure around power continuity/surges, physical security, ongoing maintenance, etc.
In addition, you're forgetting the thousands of points of failure between the building and the cloud provider. Everything from routers being DDOSed by script kiddies to ransomware gangs attacking infrastructure to Phil McCracken slicing a fiber line with his new post hole digger.
Adding complexity and moving parts never reduces points of failure. It can reduce daily operating worries as long as everything works, but it can't reduce points of failure. It also means than someday when it breaks, the root causes will be more opaque.
Many logical people have decided to abstract away their soul-crushing anxieties and legal gray area during outages to incredibly stable and well-staffed cloud infrastructure providers.
If you and your team are better at taking care of hardware than an entire building full of highly paid engineering specialists, then that's cool for you, but also, no you're not.
That's not to say you're not capable of running on-prem hardware that is stable.
I'm just saying that the high-handed swiping away of everyone else who's made an incredibly safe and logical decision to host their stuff in the cloud makes me question your general vibe.
If you plan to replicate all of AWS I'd agree with you. But if all you need is a handful of servers, you could end up with better uptime doing it in-house just because you don't have all the moving parts that make AWS tick, reducing the chance for something to go wrong.
My bare-metal servers stayed up during both of the recent outages, not because I'm some kind of genius that's better than the AWS engineers but just because it's a dead simple stack that has zero moving parts and my project doesn't require anything more complex.
The trade offs aren't quite that simple. Those specialists are necessary because they're building and maintaining infrastructure that's extremely complex since it has a crazy scale and has to be all things to all people. When you're running in-house, your infrastructure is simpler because it's custom tailored to your specific requirements and scale.
There are tradeoffs that make cloud vs local make sense in different contexts and there's no one right answer.