I was wondering the same. Why not manage servers without managing the hardware? There are several hosting providers that offer enough capacity and data centers

I was wondering the same. Why not manage servers without managing the hardware? There are several hosting providers that offer enough capacity and data centers to provide enough capacity. You'll still need people managing servers, but no one has to live close to a datacenter and you can emulate at least some cloud-like features (e.g. spinning up a new server if one server fails and dealing with the failing server later). The only companies where that doesn't work is when you need physical security for your data (locked cabinets that no one from another company can enter), but that's no concern if you already had your data in the cloud before.