[chillfox]

From my experience, large enterprises sabotage the effectiveness of internal IT with bureaucracy and politics in a misguided attempt to eliminate all possibility of mistakes being made.

It's usually done with the "let's pretend it is ITIL" process.

Let me give two examples where if I had been the client then I would absolutely have sprinted for the cloud if I could, or at the very least start talking it up as much better.

1) System outage, time to fix 5 hours and 3 minutes. The 5 hours was me sitting in front of my computer with screens open showing the problem and waiting for various managers/decision-makers to fly by and take a look as they were ping-ponging around the office panicking about what would be impacted by the fix. Everything that was going to get impacted was already impacted by the system not working, and I had to explain that to them multiple times. Towards the end of the day, I eventually got the go-ahead to do the 3 minutes of work to fix the system. This system being down had prevented another team from doing any work for the entire afternoon.

2) Two full days of politics and paperwork to get approval to do 30 minutes of work, all while the client was impatiently asking "is it done yet" every few hours.