Why the Cloud-First Mentality No Longer Serves the Modern Enterprise
RT Insights, Monday, July 6th, 2026
Public cloud's costs and constraints are pushing enterprises toward dedicated infrastructure over a default cloud-first strategy.
Author Guilherme Soubihe argues the cloud-first approach has exposed operational and financial drawbacks that make it unsuitable as a universal solution.
He cites a Barclays study showing 86% of CIOs plan cloud repatriation, plus compounding data egress fees, resource-contention bottlenecks for latency-sensitive workloads, and data-residency compliance complications.
The recommendation is a shift toward dedicated bare metal infrastructure combined with network-as-a-service, which eliminates virtualization overhead and enables sub-millisecond latency, cost predictability, and simpler compliance.
The core message: infrastructure strategy should prioritize flexibility and transparency rather than defaulting to cloud convenience.