As expensive as AWS is, at my company (Fortune 500) company with at least 2 major data centers in the US for my division alone, serving around a hundred clients

As expensive as AWS is, at my company (Fortune 500) company with at least 2 major data centers in the US for my division alone, serving around a hundred clients and thousands of web sites and applications, we found that AWS can still be a lot cheaper than a poorly run private data center. My department is technically a cost center, like most of Security, but the charge-backs we get from our own data center for various services are insanely high compared to the same services we can procure from AWS and Azure. We've been steadily moving our services out of our own data centers and into the cloud and so far, my life is a lot better. Before, just getting someone to run down a blinking disk light on a server was a chore. Getting them to rack a new server took several days or weeks. Doing anything, any changes, took several days minimum. Now, we can do it all much faster, and from all accounts of my management, it's cheaper. I don't doubt you can run your own data center cheaper, but not for my company.