Clearly, your management has never heard the phrase, "You get what you pay for." Or perhaps they heard it and didn't realize it applied to them. The savings in cloud computing comes at the expense of a loss of control over your systems, which is summed up best in the popular nerd sticker that says, "The Cloud is Just Other People's Computers." Some providers now have something called Metal-as-a-Service, which I really think ought to mean that an '80s metal band shows up at your office, plays a gig, smashes the furniture, and urinates on the carpet, but alas, it's just the cloud providers' way of finally admitting that cloud computing isn't really the right answer for all applications. For systems that require deterministic performance guarantees to work well, you really have to think very hard about whether or not a cloud-based system is the right answer, because providing deterministic guarantees requires quite a bit of control over the variables in the environment. Cloud systems are not about giving you control; they're about the owner of the systems having the control.