[hueving]

>Eventually, someone fires them and moves to the cloud with significant savings.

Significant savings is not something you get from the cloud unless you were massively over-provisioned with your hardware. In nearly every case I've seen, moving an equivalent workload to the cloud has resulted in more costs for the same size workload. But the company still made the decision to do it because it was less stuff to worry about and it made expanding that much quicker.

You pay a premium for the flexibility of the cloud.