Introduction Hybrid cloud was supposed to be a stepping stone. For most organizations, it became the permanent state. Migration timelines slipped, business-critical workloads stayed on-prem longer than anyone planned, and now teams are running infrastructure across two environments indefinitely — not by design, but by inertia. The problem isn’t the hybrid model itself. It’s that running workloads across on-premises and cloud infrastructure doesn’t just double your complexity; it multiplies the ways technical debt accumulates and hides.