[Axien]

I would disagree the cloud is more expensive. Yes you can purchase a server from Dell with a 5 year life expectancy for less than renting from AWS. But that is not the true cost.

Enterprises require high availability and disaster recovery. Start thinking multiple data centers to meet a RTO requirement after a regional failure with high speed network connectivity between the datacenters to meet your RPO requirements. Add off site backups and personnel at multiple locations and the cloud becomes very compelling.

And that is before you start optimizing your application for the cloud.