A few years ago, the advice was simple: get off-premises, get elastic, get modern. Most of that advice still holds for workloads with genuinely variable demand. It stops holding for the steady-state, high-utilization systems that a lot of enterprises migrated anyway, because migrating everything was easier to sell than migrating the right things.
That’s part of why over 80% of enterprises now say they expect to move at least some workloads back off public cloud in the next year. The problem was never the cloud itself. It was treating every workload the same. Real cloud migration consulting starts from that assessment, not a sales pitch for moving everything. A proper engagement should tell you which systems belong in the cloud, which belong on dedicated infrastructure, and which aren’t worth touching yet, before a single server moves.