Welcome, Roland.
At GBIF, we see the public clouds as having a very important enabling role for researchers, and especially when specimen/occurrence data is being mixed in with other content, such as remote sensing data. What started as a discussion here has now led us to put monthly views of GBIF occurrence data (observations/specimens with CC0 and CC-BY) onto both MS Planetary computer and Amazon as Open Datasets - we’re targeting Google next (GCS, BigQuery and EarthEngine) and others will likely follow. You can read more about it here and there is a discussion on whether CC-BY-NC should be included.
I’d describe this as being in its infancy, but I anticipate that for things like large-scale research questions and enabling the building of machine learning models this route will become the norm. It’s not a solution for the management of primary data, but for questions where e.g. a weekly/monthly view is sufficient (i.e. most research use), we think it fits well.