And it's the most bullshit one. Outsourcing the risk does not mean avoiding it, it means however putting it out of control.
This is a typical manager bullshit attitude "nobody got fired to buy IBM" that generally lead to adopt unadapted, bloated, overpriced solutions to trivial problems. Just because they do not have the balls to do things properly.
Running out of its responsibilities should be a criteria to get fired when things go badly wrong.
The outsource of the 737 MAX MCAS code to India today is a perfect example of that
Whether you're running it yourself or you outsource it, things will go wrong at some time. When this happens, and you run it yourself, you also have to explain why it went wrong in a post-mortem or RCA. The problem is that your customers have no point of reference for your explanation (how likely is it that this occurs again?). In my experience, the following message goes down a lot smoother: "This is an Azure/AWS/GCP outage which affected not just us, but 1000s of other companies. We rely on {provider} to continuously learn from their mistakes and improve their service and they've shown this in the past. Here's their post-mortem report about this outage.". Note that not all cloud providers fit this bill.
I do not criticized the fact of outsourcing when an outsourced service does a better job. This is normal and should be like that.
What I am criticizing however, is outsourcing even when local/home made/OSS solutions are a better and cheaper fit even considering SLA.... just to avoid responsibilities.
This is in my experience common, especially if the management has no technical background, no trust in his team and fear its upper layer.
What makes outsourcing hardware different from the dozens of other software as a service vendors that most companies depend on?
Why spend the time developing competency in managing servers if that doesn’t give you a competitive advantage.
But, going with the biggest most stable vendor is usually good. If you bought IBM hardware in the 70s you can still buy new hardware that supports your software. If you went with their competitors - not so much.
For 20 times the cost of commodities x86 that you should have bought by doing the right thing.
And this 20 times the cost will very likely also please your own competitors because you will yourself be less competitive.
That's how you finish with entire airline industry or bank still running on COBOL with no possibility of migration.
IBM itself is very happy about it however.
This is exactly related to what I was saying before.
There's almost no meaningful business downside for choosing poorly.
Most businesses just don't care that someone else thinks they didn't use the right tool for the job.
Should it be that way? Definitely not. But it won't change unless there's consequences (and when that happens, those products will die off quickly)
If the server goes down, you can blame Microsoft. Even the least technical person can’t blame you for that. If you create your own data center however, if it goes down, you may potentially be on the chopping block if service is interrupted.
Self preservation is a strong motivator, perhaps the strongest in a business environment.