This week I was in "passionate discussion" with colleagues in a state of denial on the economics for the cloud. Their impression was that the TCO case for cloud adoption only stacked up in the real short-term and that long-term subscriptions with cloud vendors were more expensive than their on-premise equivalents. There certainly is a break-even point from owning your on-premise solution vs. subscribing to the cloud but where this occurs depends upon how you assess the running costs and this will differ from company to company.