> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.

And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.