> It will continue to rise because it offers flexibility ... The cloud is more expensive for large companies, for most workloads.

The way I read this is that the operating costs are higher in the cloud, but presumably dwarfed by recouped opportunity costs. This makes sense to me, given my limited experience working in large companies where every interaction with IT involved a 2-6 week turnaround time. Need a VM? Fill out a bunch of paperwork and then wait a month. We missed a lot of opportunities that way.