So there's 3 things you can use the cloud for:

1) your company is totally fucked for IT management, and the cloud beats local because of incompetence (this is very common). And you're unwilling or unable to fix this. Or "your company doesn't focus on IT and never will" in MBA speak.

2) wildly swinging resource loads, where the peak capacity is only needed for 1-5% of time at most.

3) you expect to have vastly increasing resource requirements in a short time, and you're willing to pay a 5x-20x premium over dedi/colo to achieve that

We used dedicated hardware

To quote a famous businessman: "It costs money. It costs money because it saves money".