It is incredibly sad that companies and executive leadership teams are more devout to cloud and long-term contracts than their people. This is a function of poor procurement and short-term IT strategy, sure. More on that later.<p>Every day we see the hits come in. 15% here, 20% RIF there, it is relentless. Eventually these places get down to a skeleton crew.<p>I wonder, though, when many of these companies who push terabytes or petabytes across cloud and SaaS services -- will they begin to take a serious and sober look at an on-prem strategy?<p>In the last 18 months I've been part of a few projects to support teams in their efforts to do the forensics, hunt idle resources, waste, duplication, and not just trim the fat but really innovate back into on-prem.<p>Fixed costs with lots of overhead to grow.<p>Imagine that -- having petabytes of storage ready to go with a much bandwidth as a 10gig line can push all at relatively fixed costs?<p>Its possible because is it not 2013 anymore. All those APIs and automations you enjoy in cloud are available in one form or another on-prem.<p>But you still need the bare-metal expertise that seems to belong to older Millennials and the grizzled Gen-Xers (remember those salty bastards?). They are out there, hiding in the cool isles of the data-centers racking and stacking all those nvidia GPUs right now.<p>Think about it -- its time to re-evaluate the value of all this surplus SaaS and cloud convenience. We are way past the time of being intellectually lazy and hand-wavy "cloud is just better" conversations.