There's no denyin that cloud is expensive; if you think you can save money going into the cloud then I'd suggest corners have been cut; cloud is more about flexibility to adapt quickly and drive better value.
Disagree completely, many businesses I have consulted with have saved significant costs by moving a lot of elements into the 'cloud', if you do a lift and shift yes it costs more, if you do it right it does not always. Not everything is suited for the cloud, but we saw £700k a year savings from migrating from a full CoLo DataCentre to a Hybrid Environment by consolidating traditional Infrastructure to utilize more dynamic assets within the likes of Azure, scale-up/down, auto-shutdowns, using our own licensing, moving from traditional Infrastructure to SaaS/PaaS offerings, committing to multi-year deals and dealing with good Account Directors who know what they're dealing with.
If people suggest that you can't save money by going into the cloud they're approaching it wrong full stop. It's not suitable for everything, I will continue to put key focus to certain applications / infrastructure into the cloud and continue to save. We also save a huge amount of the likes of man-power costs, no more massive storage arrays that need maintenance and updating, no more vast amount of Infrastructure to take care of, no more swathes of power at the DC to pay for. We have our workload confined to two sites with a stretched vSAN Deployment and everything that is a suitable workload to the cloud sat in there. Ability to scale up without purchasing more kit with lead time and scale down without having to worry about getting rid of stuff and still having to pay expensive licensing/support costs.
I actually prefer traditional infrastructure in terms of enjoyment of working with them, but as a Consultant I always give the best advice for the business requirements, and every time thus far a Hybrid solution has been better and has saved money.