Over the past decade, cloud computing has reshaped how companies build and deliver applications. From startups to Fortune 500 giants, nearly everyone has embraced the cloud’s promise of scale, flexibility, and cost efficiency. Gartner projects global spending on public cloud services will reach $723 billion in 2025, reflecting the cloud’s central role in modern IT strategies.

Yet as adoption has soared, cracks have appeared in the “cloud-first” mindset. Many organizations now face rising costs, unexpected outages, and operational headaches stemming from an assumption: that high-speed connectivity will always be there.

But WiFi and 5G aren’t as reliable or ubiquitous as cloud architects hope. If you’re running a point-of-sale system in a busy restaurant, coordinating flight operations onboard an aircraft, or scanning inventory in a warehouse, connectivity hiccups can quickly turn a cloud-only system into a liability. 

When does relying solely on the cloud, and the internet to reach it, fall short?  And how are organizations filling this gap?

The hidden costs of always-online apps

Cloud-first was supposed to simplify operations and cut costs. But many companies have learned that pay-as-you-go pricing can be unpredictable. A 2024 survey found that 60% of businesses spend more on cloud than planned, often due to data transfer fees, over-provisioned resources, and scaling costs.

These expenses aren’t just rounding errors. One report estimates nearly a third of cloud spend is wasted. And ironically, ensuring your “cloud-native” app actually stays up requires hefty local investments: redundant WiFi networks, backup cellular modems, and expensive on-site gear to keep connectivity stable.

But doesn’t all that defeat the purpose? Cloud-first promised to reduce complexity, yet companies now juggle sprawling hybrid infrastructure anyway, just to prop up the illusion of seamless access.

Connectivity: The Weakest Link

Cloud services depend on a steady internet connection. But in most environments, outages are inevitable.

Consider these examples:

• Retail and Restaurants: A 1% network downtime in a high-volume store can translate to thousands in lost sales, not to mention angry customers and reputational damage. Even brief outages can freeze payment terminals and halt orders.
  
  
• Airlines: When an airline suffers a tech outage, hundreds of flights are delayed and thousands of travelers are stranded. The culprit? Usually a network or server failure. In aviation, minutes matter, and cloud dependency can grind operations to a halt.
  
  
• Warehouses: Large distribution centers often spend six figures annually on industrial WiFi, only to see connections drop due to interference, moving inventory, or sheer distance. For businesses that rely on real-time scanning and IoT, even short disruptions can cause chaos.
  
  

Despite “five nines” guarantees (99.999% uptime), occasional outages persist. And mobile device connections are brittle, breaking down at innoportune times due to environmental, bandwidth, or other factors. If your entire workflow is pinned to the cloud, those minutes can mean lost revenue and productivity. How much downtime can your business withstand?

A shift in mindset

If the past decade was about centralizing everything in the cloud, the next decade will be about finding balance. Hybrid solutions—where edge and cloud each do what they’re best at—offer a path to more resilient, cost-effective systems.

Forward-thinking businesses are designing “cloud-optional” architectures. This doesn’t mean giving up on the cloud. It means treating it as one tool among many, rather than the only answer.

• Chick-fil-A upgraded its point-of-sale systems to run offline if connectivity fails. Staff can keep serving guests without disruption, and data syncs automatically when the network returns.
  
  
• Alaska Airlines equips crews with edge-capable apps so in-flight service continues even when satellite connections are unreliable.
  
  
• Retail giants are shifting some workloads to local edge nodes to avoid the staggering costs and risks of depending exclusively on the cloud.
  
  

In each of these cases, edge computing isn’t replacing the cloud. It’s complementing it, by providing continuity and speed that cloud alone can’t deliver.

It’s time to embrace resilient systems

As connectivity demands grow and downtime becomes more costly, building reliable, distributed systems is no longer optional.

If your business depends on continuous uptime and responsive apps, it may be time to move past the cloud-first mindset. A hybrid, edge-enabled approach isn’t just the future, it’s what will keep your business running when the cloud inevitably comes up short.

Cloud-first architectures have their place. But in environments where every second counts, like serving guests, flying planes, or running production lines, offline-first architecture supports your business better.

Is it time to rethink connectivity? Are Wi-Fi and 5G a weak link in your operations?

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