Just my personal opinion, I know that most customer are "cloud shy", but IT world is moving towards the cloud and there is no denying the fact. I will tell you, having dealt with Smart-1 cloud for few years now, its gotten much better (CP mgmt server in the cloud) and bunch of other cloud solutions also came a long way. Is there room for improvement...OF COURSE. But, like anything, will come as time goes by.
Put it this way, yes, having physical ssh access to anything on prem is great, BUT...considering you can access cloud portal from anywhere in the world is great. I mean, you could be in Tasmania and say someone in Alaska makes a bad mistake inadvertently and you can simply fix it from across the world by creating a rule on the mgmt server from the cloud, which you could NOT do if it was on prem (not easy way anyway).