I think there's a sliding scale with cloud services. At the ultra-small scale (1 person company), it's arguably cheaper to run from a single server you bought

I think there's a sliding scale with cloud services. At the ultra-small scale (1 person company), it's arguably cheaper to run from a single server you bought. Mid-sized companies (~2-1000 people) probably benefit the most from cloud computing because they need fewer dedicated salaried employees to manage them. Beyond ~1000 employees however, you're going to need that expertise regardless of whether you use cloud or on-prem. And the markup of those thousands of cloud machines will start to become significant. You'll need to do a cost/benefit analysis and I can see it going in either direction.