Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they didn't. Because you are a hosting company. Not all companies have your expertise - most don't.
The hyperbolic difficulty that folks are applying to running your own hardware is laughable. It is as if by miracle alone that civilization made it through the precarious transitionary period where we racked our own servers into the Wonderous Utopia of Cloud. I definitely wouldn't tie my own shoe laces, only the largest orgs need laces, almost everyone can focus on walking if they use Velcro.
Right now we have 3 sysadmins for our own DC, and they can’t keep up with all the maintenance (upgrades on infra are the worst. Software quality on switches/SANs/appliances is terrifying. And those are better than quality of Server management, BIOS, etc. Even VMware has caused lots of pain with patches and upgrades in recent years.
If you don’t ever patch/upgrade to fix all the security vulnerabilities that exist at the infrastructure layer maybe “do it yourself” is cheaper. But that doesn’t fly in the banking industry.
We’re half-in the cloud and moving more there just to keep our head above water. We’re spending way less on cloud services than the $500K/year it would cost to double our infrastructure staff and keep it all in house.