[nske]

- Most businesses don't provide Internet Services to customers, so they wouldn't need fast (internet) links and servers for this

- However their own employees are typically consumers of services, that can be hosted either on the cloud, or on premises (which turns the argument on its head)

- Even for businesses that do offer services to customers over the internet, the alternative to the cloud doesn't have to be servers on their premises for this. They can be bare metal servers, either collocated or leased on datacenters. This is just fine when their services don't anticipate explosive growth. It doesn't even mean they have to sacrifice fancy "infastructure-as-code" tooling, though it does mean that they have to think about scaling in more terms than just cost.

[EricE]

Or you can just architect your application as a hybrid that can surge into the cloud as needed. Lots of ways to go about it rather than just chucking everything to the cloud and never thinking about it again.