Except in what minute of my day am I supposed to take off the hat I'm currently wearing to put on my IT Server Room hat? I don't have time to wrangle this stuff any more. I have multiple clients, I have side hustles, I have what's left of a social life after pandemic, I have family obligations. There are only so many hours in a day. If my time become more effecient by throwing a bit of money at the problem, then it is worth it to pay "experts" at something to relieve me of the burden.
There is a difference between freelancers/one person companies and big cooperations though.
Honestly, the question you need to ask in regards to cloud is a relatively simple one: Can I hire a sysadmin for cheaper than using the cloud?
The answer to that, once you start using enough resources, is more often than not yes.
Sure, it takes a while to get to that point, but eventually you will reach break even and it would be cheaper to do it yourself/have your employee do it.
Yes, but these threads of "in house is cheaper than cloud" never qualify at what size company, at what revenue being generated, etc before their version of an answer is true.
I have been on both sides. Large media production companies with very large amounts of fast and redundant storage located on-prem. These range from local attached RAIDs to large shared SAN pools. Their clients also tend to be the types that sue the crap out of you if any of their content is seen by people outside their control. Switching to cloud solutions was (still is) a huge uphill battle. However, the cloud storage needs are no where near the same (not editing content from s3), but storing approved masters for distribution totally makes sense for cloud. Now that the content is in the cloud, why not perform actions on that content in the cloud. Faster deployment, better equipment, blah blah. Next thing you know your entire workflow past editorial is in the cloud. You start to analyze your expenses and compare them to on-prem amortized expenses and you see that it could be cheaper on-prem. Also, take into consideration how long it takes to bring up that new data center. You also have to look at bandwidth expenses. Bandwidth to a new site not directly on the backbone tends to be expensive for non-residential connections. The additional power expenses of that new equipment plus the cooling is also a new expense. Power redundancy you ask? $$$ Now, you need that sysadmin and possibly a small team. At that point, you go back to your cloud rep, and renegotiate fees. You have now created an entirely new department at your company on managing the on-prem.
this is something easily left out of discussions. it doesn't matter if the equipment is in the cloud or on-prem. someone still needs to be able to manage it all. whether they phsically install new hardware or push a button on a UI to bring up a new machine, it is still needed to be done and managed.
