Screw Subscriptions
Banks used to make money by paying a small interest rate on customer savings, lending that money to others, charging interest and trousering the difference. Today, they charge billions in fees to the point where I need to keep just over 65,000 Pounds in my savings account for the interest generated to equal my monthly account fee. The bank says if I'm not happy I can go to another bank who all charge exactly the same fee structure within a few pence.
We used to be able to buy software for a fixed amount of cash, then use it as we saw fit. Now monopolies are forcing subscriptions, not because it's good for consumers, but to enrich their bottom lines with a continuous revenue stream. Cloud services hold your own data for ransom and if you don't render unto Caesar on a monthly basis then you lose access. They are suspending on-prem versions of their software forcing businesses into their Clouds. None of this benefits the customer, regardless of what the marketing hype says. Instead of having our data flow over a stable and secure 1GB network, it is now over the general Internet and subject to the ups and downs of TCP/IP. We get up to a dozen alerts of various Cloud service outages daily and bandwidth is never fixed or assured.
Our IT department was forced to move our mail/collaboration services to the Cloud by a group of company accountants and "progressive" VP's (That's the name they applied to themselves) who wanted "real-time" Cloud collaboration. Not one person in IT agreed with that decision, nor were they consulted. Today those accountants / VP's are the loudest complainers when their multiple pivot table linked 650 MB Excel files are slow to load. "It was never this slow before!" They write in ticket emails. They drank their own Kool-Aid and hate the taste, then they blame IT. We've lost a lot of good people who gave up in disgust at this behaviour.
One resignation letter of someone who spent 40 years in IT and had enough, said it best before he retired. "We are a client facing business dealing with literal life and death scenarios daily. You have placed both core business processes and contact with our clients in the hands of another company and now pay them monthly to maintain it. If that service ever fails and inevitably it will, people will die. The cost to corporate reputation will far exceed any loss on the GL. I do not wish to see that day."
Cloud services are a Briar Patch. Easy to upload into it and very difficult to get data out or transfer to a competitor. You can go to a rival Cloud provider, but they charge subscriptions as well. Your only choice is who you give your money too; after that you are screwed.
One day, and I suspect soon, some hax group will gain full access to back end cloud systems and cost the subscribing companies trillions in losses. That will motivate a swing back to on-prem, but only when the accountants are ankle deep in blood. And, of course, they will blame IT for it.