In the early days of cloud adoption, the cloud-first era encouraged organizations to migrate as many workloads as possible to public cloud platforms. While this promised agility, scalability, and cost savings, this approach exposed several critical weaknesses, particularly around cost control, performance, compliance, and resilience. These challenges have forced
organizations to reassess their migration decisions and, in some cases, are actively moving selected workloads back out of the public cloud in a trend known as cloud repatriation. This shift reflects a broader move toward a more measured, workload-specific strategy that blends public cloud, private cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. The emerging cloud-smart era promotes a more strategic balance, selecting the right blend of platforms for each workload to optimize cost, performance, and control. For modern CIOs and IT leaders, the key question is no longer if to move to the cloud, but what, when, and where to move. Leaders who understand this shift are better equipped to align platform decisions with …