What the cloud gives you is the removal of the inter-department conflict between IT and Product Engineering. This is especially bad since IT is a cost-center ra

What the cloud gives you is the removal of the inter-department conflict between IT and Product Engineering. This is especially bad since IT is a cost-center rather than a revenue generator. Having a single provider who in turn has a single client is a horrible dynamic. It can work for the short term but long term you get really odd dynamics. Sure the cloud is expensive but so is the aggregate opportunity cost of waiting 3 months and spending 20 hours in meetings for a single dev server.