[diamondap]

If your management has been letting that wasteful situation go on for a long time, there's not much you can do. It sounds like there's some dysfunction in management. I've seen that in many businesses. Unfortunately, the money they're wasting on maintaining two environments is probably preventing the company from moving forward in other ways.

That said, a number of companies have left the cloud for cost reasons. 37 Signals is a recent high-profile example: https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

I've read of others leaving for cost reasons as well. Many run niche workloads that don't make sense in the cloud. One company, if I recall correctly, was doing scientific processing that required massive, but not unlimited, CPU and GPU resources. They found it was cheaper to buy a bunch of high-end workstations and run their jobs locally. They didn't need the cloud's 24/7 uptime guarantees, because they were doing offline processing with no public-facing apps.