They buy it because it's enough to tick the corporate compliance box. Decisions made by people that don't actually give a F

It's all because of something that started years ago: the move to the cloud.

Companies started to move to cloud like there was no tomorrow.

Their on-prem products became maintenance or zombies.

Now you want the self hosted? Good luck.

What's the alternative for a SaaS provider? Support all the possible cloud alternatives? That's nearly impossible, so some companies (mainly big organizations) provide their software/SaaS in AWS gov regions and so be it.

(Or... be smart, see the trend and start selling your software again in self-hosted solutions!)

For a consumer (gov, for example) this means: you don't have that feature, you give in, or you build it/let it build (open source).

This is the only reason why we saw the recent announcement of the Austrian govt that was able to migrate from MS to Nextcloud. Without an alternative, ... they couldn't have done anything.