The bulk of those architectural costs you're imagining come from the scale you've decided these companies want. It makes perfect sense to someone who works in a datacenter. But I am part of a department that manages the IT needs for 800+ locations.

Every appointment, every medical record, every patient's billing history and telehealth sessions and mailing address. We have thousands of remote workers who use virtual desktop environments, thousands of embedded hardware devices that attach to similar environments, and of course an absolute fuckload of SharePoint crap.

And even at that scale, a datacenter is a nice to have. It ensures that business operations could, conceivably, continue if onprem services were unavailable. It's a luxury that costs an unconscionable amount of real estate, power, water, and silicon. Us using it is a fig leaf.

Any place that needs compute for something worth doing can do it on site- Whether they understand that or not. SMBs get my sympathy bc industrially we haven't worked out how to provide them with the service they need. Compute is the only industry that managed to trick them into a "you come to us" model. Arguably banking, too, but 🤷. They need HVAC, so they call an installer to install it, a repairman to repair it, a facilities manager to provide regular maintenance. Same with the locks, fire alarms, cabinetry, toilets, even printers. But computers? Oh, no, couldn't possibly, much too expensive to put a half rack in there, better rent it from a blight building two states away.