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.