For some folk, the risk of money cost outweighs the risk of loss of
direct operational control.

Those folks also tend to learn hard lessons about what happens when the Magic Cloud provider fails in a way that isn't possible to anticipate because it's all black box. 

Saving 12 months of opex $ sounds great, except when you lose 18 months of opex $ in 2 days completely outside of your ability to control. 

I think for the vast majority of cloud users they'd do a way worse job at uptime than the providers. Whether that applies to some telcos, I'm not sure.

Mike