The biggest part missing from the opposing side is: Their view is very much rooted in the pre-Cloud hardware infrastructure world, where you'd pay sysadmins a full salary to sit in a dark room to monitor these servers.
The reality nowadays is: the on-prem staff is covered in the colo fees, which is split between everyone coloing in the location and reasonably affordable. The software-level work above that has massively simplified over the past 15 years, and effectively rivals the volume of work it would take to run workloads in the cloud (do you think managing IAM and Terraform is free?)
> do you think managing IAM and Terraform is free?
No, but I would argue that a SaaS offering, where the whole maintenance of the storage system is maintained for you actually requires less maintenance hours than hosting 30 PB in a colo.
In terraform you define the S3 bucket and run terraform apply. Afterwards the company's credit card is the limit. Setting up and operating 30 PB yourself is an entirely different story.
yeah colo help has been great, we had a power blip and without any hassle they covered the cost and installation of UPSes for every rack, without us needing to think abt it outside of some email coordination.