In a modern development environment, performance and security are inextricably linked. Our 2026 Artifact Management Report reveals that software development in the age of AI is sitting on a fragile foundation of complex infrastructure and institutional inertia.
As teams become more distributed and the volume of artifacts, from standard containers to multi-gigabyte AI models, continues to grow, the “performance gap” between central hubs and remote regions is becoming a critical failure point for the global enterprise.
Maintaining artifact management systems isn't just a background task; for many, it’s a significant drain on high-value engineering resources. When your infrastructure is a legacy, self-hosted system, scaling is rarely a “set it and forget it” operation.
Our data shows that on-prem solutions remain common in otherwise cloud-centric industries. A significant portion of the industry remains stuck in a cycle of reactive maintenance – patching, upgrading, and manually provisioning storage just to keep pipelines moving.
In fact, our survey found that over 27% of engineering teams are now losing more than 20 hours every month to basic registry upkeep. This is time that could be spent on strategic product initiatives, rather than managing the plumbing of the software supply chain. When your infrastructure requires manual intervention to survive a release cycle, your operational overhead stifles your deployment speed.
For global organizations, the distance between a developer and their artifact registry translates directly into lost productivity. Legacy systems designed for a single data center struggle to provide parity for engineers in remote regions, leading to a two-tier developer experience.
A slow download or a registry timeout isn't just an annoyance; it's a blocker that causes CI/CD pipelines to fail. For teams distributed across continents, the performance problems at the edge result in inconsistent build times and frequent disruptions. Our report explores the depth of this performance imbalance and why centralizing your infrastructure in a single data center is no longer a viable strategy for the global stage.
Cloudsmith was built to solve the performance limitations of localized registries. By utilizing a genuinely cloud-native architecture, we move your artifacts closer to the people and machines that need them, regardless of where they are in the world.
As organizations start to deal with the increasing demands placed on development pipelines by AI, they require managed, high-performance solutions to keep up. Our data shows that 43% of organizations are already planning to migrate to managed cloud solutions in the next 12 months, while another 18% want to migrate but are currently blocked..
Consolidating your infrastructure into a single, cloud-native source of truth isn’t just about speed; it’s about ensuring your delivery pipeline is resilient enough to handle the massive scale of AI-related development.
See the full infrastructure breakdown
This post highlights just one part of the performance challenges facing modern DevOps teams. For a deep dive into regional latency issues, the impact of outages on release cycles, and more data on the true cost of legacy tech debt, download the full report.
