You hit the nail on the head regarding the math. Most teams treat cloud costs as an inevitable tax rather than an engineering variable. As someone with an accounting background turned Cloud Architect, I see this 'math gap' daily. Usually, it's not a cloud vs. on-prem issue, but a lack of infrastructure discipline—idle resources and unoptimized NATs burn through that 48-month budget faster than hardware depreciation ever would. I’ve been using a 'Hardened by Design' framework to cut this waste by 50% without the overhead of moving back to a data center. Efficiency is often just better IaC.