Quite the opposite. If you're a small business in need of compute, then it's quite a value.
I'll give you a case in point. I have a friend who works for a construction company. He has three servers he's cobbled together all at one site, and a NAS for storage. They provide email and document sharing, accounts management, etc. Every new blueprint that comes through needs to be reviewed for accuracy, but they come in as images, so he has another server that just runs tesseract OCR when he gets a pdf in. He asked me if he should get three servers, or one and virtualize the three. He wanted to plan for growth, but didn't know what that would be. the NAS was underutilized.
He's buying no servers. He's setting up Workmail and Workdocs for their users. (Workspaces is an option in the future.) Blueprints are uploaded to S3 as they come in, where the file arrival notification triggers a lambda function that performs an OCR pass on the file and dumps it into a new bucket. Because this function runs on-demand, he avoids paying for a server to sit there, and only pays a few cents for a doc. His other services no longer run on servers he has to manage, so he doesn't worry about patching. He has reliable, off-site backups for the first time and version control, and he only pays for the exact amount of storage he's using as opposed to buying space for his NAS in advance. And he doesn't need to worry about scaling.
That story plays out all the time. It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs than large corporations that already are likely to have massive sunk costs in datacenter space and assets. If you're a small business, the moment you go cloud you not only save money, but you gain capabilities (the biggest being in redundancy and reliability, which are the most important...how many small businesses have a DR/COOP capability on-prem?) which you would never have had otherwise.
I'll give you a case in point. I have a friend who works for a construction company. He has three servers he's cobbled together all at one site, and a NAS for storage. They provide email and document sharing, accounts management, etc. Every new blueprint that comes through needs to be reviewed for accuracy, but they come in as images, so he has another server that just runs tesseract OCR when he gets a pdf in. He asked me if he should get three servers, or one and virtualize the three. He wanted to plan for growth, but didn't know what that would be. the NAS was underutilized.
He's buying no servers. He's setting up Workmail and Workdocs for their users. (Workspaces is an option in the future.) Blueprints are uploaded to S3 as they come in, where the file arrival notification triggers a lambda function that performs an OCR pass on the file and dumps it into a new bucket. Because this function runs on-demand, he avoids paying for a server to sit there, and only pays a few cents for a doc. His other services no longer run on servers he has to manage, so he doesn't worry about patching. He has reliable, off-site backups for the first time and version control, and he only pays for the exact amount of storage he's using as opposed to buying space for his NAS in advance. And he doesn't need to worry about scaling.
That story plays out all the time. It's arguably a bigger savings for smaller people who can't afford the upfront costs than large corporations that already are likely to have massive sunk costs in datacenter space and assets. If you're a small business, the moment you go cloud you not only save money, but you gain capabilities (the biggest being in redundancy and reliability, which are the most important...how many small businesses have a DR/COOP capability on-prem?) which you would never have had otherwise.