There is a lot of snake oil when it comes to the promotion of IoT, Big Data, and social media. It's the applications and the people behind them that have failed us, not the concept of cloud based computing itself.

Yes, to successfully move your solution from on-prem to a cloud platform requires retrofitting your application and even adopting some new design patterns. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Honestly, for many organizations, the cloud provider probably does a better job of disaster recovery and security than what they had been doing in-house with their their legacy application.
Even being forced to keep tabs on what resources your various projects and teams members and utilizing is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, does the accounting application really need to truncate and reload 2 TB of data at the end of every month, perhaps there is a more efficient way of doing that? It's sort of like when the government starts charging corporations for each ton of pollution they produce, and then corporations are incentivized to start inventing new ways to minimize pollution.