The cloud is a terrible bet for many large companies. The benefits are minimal while the risks are huge, however what’s in the best interest for the company is only tangentially related to what happens.
It’s really difficult to ensure companies actually take low probability risks seriously. A 1% chance to lose 10 billion dollars is an easy bet for upper management to make when their personal risks and rewards don’t line up with the company’s risks and rewards.
As to the risks, many companies live and die by their internal secrets. These range from a private keys, customer lists, trading strategies, and similar trade secrets to actual serious R&D efforts.
Sometimes the damage is obvious such as crypto exchanges suddenly finding themselves broke, but corporate espionage can also be kept quite. Losing major government bids because a competitor read some internal memo’s is a serious risk and you may never know.
It’s much harder to reconstruct actionable intelligence from a huge stream of people using Google search even if they’re using it to preform sensitive calculations.
There’s plenty of high profile fuckups from people falling to AWS specific gotcha’s.