Competing with an Azure, AWS, or GCP data center would absolutely be a _really_ expensive proposition, but it’s not something most Fortune 500s need (or want) to do. Hyperscaler data centers are intentionally designed to effectively be both available to (almost) every possible customer while also adhering to (almost) every GRC framework, redundancy metric, and security requirement that most of those potential customers may ask for.

If you’re running your own data center, you don’t need to worry about most of that. You only have to worry about your own needs or that of your customers.

The misconception that it’s either-or, or that the cloud is the prime solution for all use cases, is simply the result of really effective evangelism and marketing. That so many people working in software don’t have deep hardware expertise or are not familiar with data centers plays to that hand. Not a criticism, just an observation from my experiences.

Not that the cloud isn’t a very powerful option indeed.