India, April 12 -- As the world begins its second year under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is becoming increasingly clear that the cloud is no longer the universal solution to information technology's fundamental need to deploy secure, scalable infrastructure and applications in a cost-effective manner. If anything, the cloud landscape is about to darken significantly for organizations of all types, and IT must be prepared.

This reckoning, of sorts, has been a long time coming. Tightening regulatory regimes, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) marked a major milestone when it was implemented in May 2018. It disrupted the business world by imposing privacy rules on any global organizations hold...