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Renting a rack is not the same as running a data center. The technical sophistication is available. It can be hired on the employment market or contracted as an ad-hoc service. Many colos offer a hands fee to have their staff do things like install disks on your behalf, and there is always the traditional managed server.

Chasing the cloud has cost companies a massive amount of money. I'm familiar with companies that would've saved nearly a million bucks a year by staying on bare metal/in-rack hypervisor. They weren't forced into the cloud by a shortage of people who could perform hardware maintenance, they went because it was the hip thing to do.