> One very good strategic reason to do this, I think, would be to gain independence from cloud providers, who unfortunately happen to be your major competitors.

> One very good strategic reason to do this, I think, would be to gain independence from cloud providers, who unfortunately happen to be your major competitors. All of the questions you asked before (risks, capex, etc.) all would have been answered during an assessment period. It's almost as if you assumed that none of that was done and that their sys admin group just through together a proposal to move to a colo and their executive management made a decision to do so. That's not how this works. The number one priority of this type of initiative was cost and reliability. Going exclusively cloud is not a silver bullet for every company - that trope needs to die.