Most very large old-school industrial firms still own and run a lot of iron on-prem, especially in data-privacy focused places like Germany. My employer, one of those old-school German industrial firms, is just starting to dip its little toes into the cloud - everything important is still on-prem. Companies are talking in public about their cool cloud stuff, but talking to my fellow OSGIF engineers, we're all really in the Proof of Concept phase, pretty much.

Big difference between running on colo'd hardware and running on cloud. It's still "own hardware" in someone else's rack.

> Noone has been running their own datacenter for a while.

I tend to agree that new businesses are very unlikely to invest in their own metal - because it's not really a path to profitability, but many small-medium businesses run their own data centers. Especially if the business was founded in the 90s and the leadership hasn't chosen to invest in tech.

Many businesses choose not to scale (in ways which cloud services would help) - many more just have no need to scale (i.e. regional service providers).