"We're on a project to go almost 100% cloud over the next two years."
Ah, the cloud...
Always laughed at the concept.
All it means is that your data is now on off-site servers, which are out of your control. They're not electron bits floating freely around in "a cloud.'
(rubs hands gleefully) Oh boy, this has suddenly become one of those threads where we flip a coin and see if Mike shows an ounce of humility and learns something, or just gets angrier and angrier until it's locked. 
Angrier and angrier, obviously.
I'm not quite as leery about cloud as I used to be. One simple reason. The customers now collectively have enough lawyers to make the providers live up to expectations. It's also maturing. The weaker players have been shaken out. AWS and Azure will stick around. AWS is essentially larger than the next handful of cloud providers put together, but that will change because MS is 'forcing' a lot of people towards Azure if they want to use MS products. AWS is making money hand over fist. If you told me that Amazon's IT department was more profitable than the rest of the business combined, I wouldn't remotely be surprised.
That said, you can lose your shirt if you don't know what you are doing. It's just as dangerous as running your own internal resources if you don't have a clue. AWS and similar clouds are huge huge huge targets for rogue entities. State sponsored hacker groups like China, Russia or our own 'beloved' NSA are definitely threats against our core infrastructure. On the other hand, cloud providers have more niche security staff than even megacorps generally can hire full time. Renting your infrastructure vs owning can make economic sense. It's a thousand times more dangerous and complex than the 'cloud' marketing says, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Again, tiny linux servers? You'd have to be flat out insane to self-host at current pricing. That's where "cloud" is the norm and self-hosting has become unusual.
Netflix, for example, generally runs none of their own infrastructure and they're essentially the largest content provider on the internet (possibly the entire world). Except for maybe Youtube. They don't run their cloud infrastructure like any person would run their domestic infrastructure. Nifty thing is, they open source huge amount of their tooling, which is flat out insane. Good, but insane. I'd explain chaos monkeys and dynamic load balancing and hadoop and all kinds of other stuff.
But it's not something to immediately write off. This is coming from a guy that firmly reminds people that there is no cloud, it's just renting a server from someone else.
People who think the cloud is nothing more than remote servers don't understand the cloud
Correct. Some routers and switches are involved as well.
Considering the industry shift, anyone in IT who is still ignorant of the cloud would do well to ensure they actually make an effort to understand the tech, as the days of on prem services for many technologies are numbered
I worry people actually believe this as a real meaningful statement. I mean, if you REALLY know what you're doing, yes, kinda sorta not really. If you taking to the average manager, it's important to make eye contact and explain it's a marketing statement. IaaS and SaaS are tools. Potentially good tools. But they're just another tool in the bucket of other tools. Maybe a major tool that you use for a huge part of your daily job. Anyone trying to sell you a hammer that swears it will obsolete every other tool in the bucket is lying, because they're being paid to lie to you. I'm not bashing Fitz, he knows exactly what I mean. He also knows to beware of idiots with high spending authorization that stupidly listen to marketing drones over their own people.
It's equal stupid to swear a tool is never useful as it is to claim it is useful for absolutely everything. Bandwidth is not universal and not falling at predicted rates. And I mean for bloody everything. Home, cell or fiber. Because the telecoms own Congress. I don't see that changing. That's the fundamental limit on IaaS, SaaS and every other XaaS. Most of the country has one provider and very unpromising backup providers. If you DO have hardened multiply redundant interwebz connections at appropriate speeds, then yes, it's a good gamble with only moderate risk.
That said, and I tell anyone with cloudz fever, make sure you always have an exit strategy. Prices could go up, businesses close, quality and support change. People ALWAYS go pants on head retarded eventually.
