Most companies didn’t rethink their cloud strategy because of one dramatic failure. It started quietly: cloud bills that became harder to explain, contracts that felt less flexible, and data that suddenly came with legal and regulatory strings attached. Over time, those details added up. In 2025, enterprises began shifting from cloud-first optimism to control-first design. Hybrid stopped being a compromise, private cloud became the baseline again, and data ownership quietly started dictating architecture decisions. This episode is about why that shift is happening—and what it means going into 2026.