Where you won't have to cut POs or fight to get equipment and then manage cooling.

Ours has the same strangeness (we run both).

The internal hurdles to get money released for physical equipment, staff, or space is high. The internal hurdles for more cost on a cloud service we already have are almost non-existent. Our current lead time on a new workstation PC is about two weeks internally, relative to spinning up a new cloud VM which is about two hours.

• Get request for new PC
  
• Generate PO
  
• Send request + PO for approval
  
• They confirm the vendor is approved
  
• They confirm with requestee's department budget will be debited
  
• PO approved
  
• Order placed
  

Vs.

• Request a new VM
  
• Approved/Denied
  
• Start VM
  

I will admit that VMs only come out of one department's budget (ours) and we're only dealing with a single vendor ever so it isn't quite 1:1 but that's still the reality on the ground.