The cost-benefit analysis of cloud versus on-premises infrastructure varies greatly depending on the organization.
The cost of the cloud is where things usually go off the rails. The cloud is still the most convenient platform for building and deploying new systems, such as generative AI, and it also has the latest and greatest of pretty much everything. However, when enterprises run workloads and data sets using traditional infrastructure patterns, such as business applications that process and store data the same way they did when on-premises, there is a negative cost impact to using a public cloud.
“Unmet expectations” describes most technology trends I’ve been involved with, including client/server, enterprise application integration, service-oriented architecture, and now cloud.