In SOME cases, it is cheaper than on prem.
If you need a lot of compute power occasionally, it can be cheaper.
If you actually scale up and down according to the load (which a lot of companies do not do), it might be cheaper.
But a large amount of companies don’t fall in those cases or don’t do it efficiently.
Some spend in a year the same amount they would have paid for on prem servers they would have kept 5 years or more.
Cloud providers offer other things like multi regional redundancy, which can be hard to achieve for smaller businesses.
In SOME cases, it is cheaper than on prem. If you need a lot of compute power occasionally, it can be cheaper. If you actually scale up and down according to the load (which a lot of companies do not do), it might be cheaper. But a large amount of companies don’t fall in those cases or don’t do it efficiently. Some spend in a year the same amount they would have paid for on prem servers they would have kept 5 years or more.
Cloud providers offer other things like multi regional redundancy, which can be hard to achieve for smaller businesses.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and not just downvoting like most others!