Based on my experience on a couple of govt organizations, the IT departments are very small, compared to the total workforce, and has to deal with decades of legacy. In this environment, any change in direction is considered (way too) carefully - a big ship turns slowly and all that.

Since the team was experienced in dealing with Windows VMs, practically everything else was MS-based and MS offers lucrative bundling, Azure was thought to be the natural continuation on the infra side. One major outsourced software project nailed that trajectory, and due to the small headcount, multicloud was not desireable.

And this is where I jumped in. I'd like to think I was promoting improving our on-prem capabilities until a question of "could we have a reverse proxy so we could access some internal databases from the Internet instead of relying on overnight database copies" hit a steel wall. Having heard murmurings of achieving the same via Azure APIM and ExpressRoute, I clung on, since as an architect I needed that capability for multiple projects.

And after that, it was only natural to take more steps in. Slippery slide and all :p

But as I mentioned, luckily all this has been so slow that reversing is not the end of the world. Unlike some of our sibling organizations who have little to no on-prem capabilities left