[keeda]

I'd say it's more of a rent vs buy situation, in that there is a particular company-specific scale at which the TCO's cross over. For smaller companies, public clouds absolutely make more sense, but at larger scales on-prem is much cheaper (see e.g. BaseCamp's recent shift with numbers.)

The reason I say that a primary driver is a focus on core competencies because there are a surprisingly high number of companies with 10M+ public cloud spends... and even they sometimes complain about being treated as small potatoes. (For reference BaseCamp's spend was 3.2M/year when they decided to switch back.) Plus there are reports showing that much of these cloud deployments are at abysmally low levels of utilization (like 30% at best!)

So not only are there many companies at the scale where on-prem would make sense, they are likely even wasting a significant % of their cloud spend, yet they continue and even expand their usage.

Rather than attributing this to widespread corporate incompetency, a more rational explanation is that they have a sensible calculus that is based on more than solely financial numbers, i.e. the organizational distration is more expensive than the $$$ cloud premium.