Strategic Infrastructure Report · 2026
The Economics of Cloud Repatriation
When to stay, when to move, and how to decide. An honest examination of when cloud economics break down, what on-premise infrastructure actually costs, and how leading enterprises are making smarter, workload-specific decisions in 2026.
86%
of CIOs planned workload repatriation in 2025
27%
of cloud spend wasted on idle resources
6.4%
cloud cost inflation 2023–2024
What's Inside
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The Cloud Boom and Its Aftermath — why the lift-and-shift trap turned the cloud premium into a cloud penalty for many enterprises
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The True Cost of Cloud — the bill behind the bill, covering egress fees, idle resources, vendor lock-in, and compliance add-ons
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A Workload-First Decision Framework — a five-dimension placement guide to evaluate workloads against cloud, on-premise, and hybrid infrastructure
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The Five Questions Every CIO Should Ask — a diagnostic checklist to determine whether a formal TCO analysis is justified
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The Kubernetes Factor — how platform engineering turned repatriation from a rewrite project into an infrastructure decision
