Having worked in mostly small shops, it is also very high risk.

If you've purchased the hardware and software, you can still keep running if you have to take the drastic step of cutting out maintenance on them. You just stop paying the bill (granted at some risk).

However, if you stop paying the bill in the cloud world you can suddenly find yourself unable to continue operating at all.

And what happens if your business has to retract? Are the cloud vendors going to let you drop back a tier on volume readily, or are you stuck paying for a volume/service level that you can no longer justify or afford?