[abakker]

This is true if you are first and foremost a company that provides technology to other customers, and in that case, you

a) have a very competent dev and ops team b) have a business where you are the provider of an SLA.

For many companies with 5K+ employees, they are already distributed, already have multiple data centers, have workers all over the globe, and, when they are not primarily in the IT delivery business, tend to have IT departments that have limited budgets, lack of training and poor organizational awareness.

This leads to poor security practice, poor cost analysis, and long/nonexistent upgrade cycles on many behind-the-scenes workloads.

You are of course right, there are many diverse reasons to be on-prem, but at some point, many of those reasons go away with sufficient size and differing priorities. Things change when a company's business involves the consumption of IT services, rather than the delivery of IT services.