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Notes -
The way I explain it to my clients is that cloud is advantageous when you have unpredictable growth as it has the ability to scale up or down very quickly. Good for startups, good if you're expanding into new markets and face uncertainty. On-prem will usually end up cheaper if you can more or less predict how to size your infrastructure for the next 5 years. I imagine it might be unpopular in some domains to admit to shareholders that you know the company is not going to suddenly double in size.
That said, some companies (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) are working hard on bringing the disadvantages of cloud to on-premise anyway, making permanent fixed-cost licences unavailable or impractical, pushing even on-prem users to per-user and subscription models for software.
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