> But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?

When testing something or you want to spin up your own isolated environment for yourself or for your team? Very often.

> Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.

And that’s get back to my other point that when you do a “lift and shift”. If you don’t change your processes both IT and technical, you won’t see any benefit from the cloud and you will end up spending more.

There are so many ways that you can both give developers freedom and still have the necessary guardrails. I’m speaking about AWS because that’s the one I know best (and where I work). But I’m sure there are equivalent services on other providers.

For instance you can have a vending machine type of setup where you allow department heads to set up non prod accounts with organization controlled service control policies. You can use a Service Catalog approach where you surface Terraform or CloudFormation defined products where the users can only provision infrastructure defined by their administrators. But they can do it themselves.

Depending on which level of the organization I’m working with, I try to convince the IT department to give individual departments their own organizational unit to monitor and to embed someone from IT into their team - ie a “DevOps” philosophy.