There was a time, about a decade ago, when the cloud was 'just someone else's computer'.  In that era, 'the cloud' was simply data storage that wasn't local- a glorified NAS box somewhere out in a field in Ohio. 

Those days are over.

In this day and age, I can pipe a video stream straight from a CCTV camera into AWS and have Rekognition read a license plate number, look that number up against an RDS table or just a spreadsheet in S3, and sent an SMS message to the person in the vehicle that they can come in.  Or I could use the feed for auxiliary authentication for an RFID based security system.  There's no 'someone else's computer' that does that with such minimal set up time and administration.

There is an increased amount of difficulty in getting across the value of thinking cloud first to industrial companies and small businesses.  Industrial data processes have many additional layers of integration and complexity because of the need to acquire information from machines; and the 'front end' of industry hasn't exactly been known for its clean and efficient data strategies.  Demonstrating value as a 'here's a working example' is also difficult, as companies in the industrial space have traditionally been much more tight-lipped than their retail brethren- so finding somone willing to share their success story in any medium outside of a lipstick-and-mascara covered PowerPoint slide deck is very rare.

Small business is an equally difficult customer to bring to a realization of value, but that is because of the sheer variety of needs and current configuration.  A 25-person dentist office may have a SaaS tool for HR, but a master-apprentice photography outfit is likely just to keep it in a spreadsheet.  A local spreadsheet.  Our experience with smaller businesses is that the bulk of the value lies in a cloud based storage solution and a handful of microservice integrations coordinated with Lambda functions or Azure Logic Apps.