Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
Just hired a 45yo who excels and loves and thrives doing this stuff. Proxmox, local storage, local backups + offsite backups. 1Pb of data, colocation costs are 5k/month. Guess AWS costs for similar
Offer just half of the typical AWS cloud bill and you'll magically have lots of candidates! But greed often doesn't let companies pay any more than "market rate" even if it means paying twice that to AWS or a vendor instead.