Re: If you let the same elderly, incompetent, IT staff….
Yeah.... nah.
Cloud is just... meh, nothing really new.
It's a machine that sits somewhere else. Ok, it is a VM sitting somewhere else. Actually, you run a container on a VM somewhere else. The container contains an OS (well, parts of it, close enough) and your workload. It can talk to other containers using e.g. a network stack.
What is new (well, newer) is spliting things into simple chunks, microservices (actually nothing really new), and you no longer have to care about how the VM really is configured, because that's the provider's problem. Having stuff inside containers, iff set up correctly, can help spinning up new instances on demand (and this is pretty awesome and actually the new thing) without too much hassle. When I was still doing scientific computing on actual clusters this was more difficult (and thanks to your overhead depending on how work was split - core -> cpu -> node -> unit) it likely still is, should you want just raw power). Unless you have your workload actually split into microservices - rather than the meso-services I see - there is only limited benefit from running the stuff off-prem on somebody else's computer.
Now we need to explain to senior manglement that there is no benefit for the company (yeah, the customers will benefit, hopefully) if we are the (mandated, because Gubmint) cloud, i.e. we still need the datacentre. And thanks to SNTM (stupidity of non-technical managers) this is... hard work. Getting this stack to work as intended is also indeed something for the bright lads and lasses, though many a greybeard has more clue than the new and so-green-they-need-mowing kids.