The wrong first question
Asking whether cloud or on-premises is better usually produces a generic argument. The more useful question is what the workload needs and what the business is equipped to operate.
Managed cloud services can remove operational burden and provide scale quickly. Dedicated infrastructure can make predictable, data-heavy or private workloads more economical. Hybrid systems can use both deliberately.
What to measure
Start with utilisation, data movement, latency, uptime requirements, recovery objectives, security constraints and the cost of the people needed to operate the system.
Then identify which services are creating genuine leverage and which costs have accumulated through convenience, drift or over-provisioning.
A practical outcome
The result should be a workload map rather than one sweeping migration. Some services may stay managed, some may move to dedicated infrastructure and some may need to run close to users or equipment.
Architecture is a portfolio of decisions. Good judgement is more valuable than loyalty to one deployment model.