Hmm, not convinced about that.

My Boss is smart and he'd wonder what the business plan would be should say 5 years down the line you want to move away from the cloud for some reason.

You threw away decades of accumulated knowledge about the company and it's systems to save some money upfront.

He thinks on a longer scope than most bosses I've known though (largely because his family own the group so he doesn't have to answer to shareholders).

But if your business is to produce, say, cars, why would you want to maintain this knowledge in house. You certainly want to understand your systems, but do you really want to deal with physical datacentres, updating the underlying OS, replacing drives, etc. You kind of want it outsourced to specialists.

Yeah, that ought to be a great sales line.

I'd be wary about how the real world actually deals with that, but there is no lack of large companies jumping on short term costs cuts without looking at the risks.

From the point of view of upper management in a large enterprise, paying a third party with whom they have an SLA and someone to sue for infrastructure which may go down vs. paying their own staff to build and maintain the infrastructure that may go down often either isn't a difference in risk or, actually, the former seems to be better-managed risk. It's the same reason they often prefer to buy support contracts even for OSS rather than supporting it internally. Part of the analysis that probably gets overlooked from the outside is that employees aren't just a predictable cost they also are a risk.

> isn't a difference in risk

Really? People incentivised into looking for your best interests vs. a managed organization incentivised into dissolving your contract and gaining on average. I can't imagine anything that could create more different risks.

What people seem to do all the time is looking at an SLA and believing the real world must behave the way things are on paper; because there's a signature there. People do this even after being recently burned by the same partner. Some people have the same trust for in house staff, but the usual on high management is to have the exact opposite bias.