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.

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.

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?

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.

Fixed costs with lots of overhead to grow.

Imagine that -- having petabytes of storage ready to go with a much bandwidth as a 10gig line can push all at relatively fixed costs?

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.

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.

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.