At $50/month scale a lot of things are possible. Most companies cannot store their data in a hard disk in a safe. If you can, then cloud is a convenience not a necessity for you. I.e. you are perfectly fine running your storage stack for the most part.

My company is not very big(100ish employees) and we pay $200k+ for AWS in just storage and AWS is not even out primary cloud. If we have to do what you have, it is probably in bandwidth costs alone another $500k. Add running costs in another cloud and recurring bandwidth for transfers , retrieval from Glacier for older data on top of that.[1]

Over 3 years that would be easily $1-$1.5 million in net new expenses for us scale.

No sane business is going to sign off on +3x storage costs on a risk that cannot be easily modeled[2] and costs that cannot be priced into the product, just so one sysadmin can sleep better at night.

[1]your hard disk in a safe third component is not sensible discussion point at reasonable scale.

[2] this would be probability of data loss with AWS * business cost of losing that data > cost of secondary system.

Or probability of data availablity event(like now) * business cost of that > cost of an active secondary system .

For almost no business in the world the either equation would be valid.

For example even the cost is 100B dollars in revenue with 6 nines of durability the expected loss would be only $10,000 (100B * 0.000001) a secondary system is much costlier than that.

I don't get how this is relevant at all, it's more about how much data your company stores than how many employees it has.

I've worked for a company with 5000 employees that stored less data (fewer data?) than my current employer that has less than 100.

> No sane business is going to sign off on +3x storage costs on a risk that cannot be easily modeled

Probably not, but for us the cost is about 0.1x our aws storage costs, so it's a no-brainer.