[znpy]

> For most organizations, however, it's hard to justify investing millions of dollars up-front in the hope that at some point you'll be saving enough to make that pay off.

Well if you have your bills and a prospect of how much building and operating a datacenter would be, it could be very easy to do the calculation.

Btw one should not dismiss so easily the work of datacenter companies. They often have very high security standards and practices.

And this means that you don't necessarily have to build a datacenter from the ground up. You can start saving by just renting one or two rack cabinets and start putting your own hardware in there.

[acdha]

Oh, I’m not being dismissive of their work - it’s just multiple lines of skilled work which you have to complete. The building, hardware, and software management all require 24x7 operations and security, work with vendors and capacity planning, etc. and overseeing all of that work.

At some level of usage those costs are lower than the savings but that line has been going up for years, especially for anyone who needs PCI, HIPAA, FEDRAMP, etc. where there’s a ready package available covering a lot of it.