At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, every factory had its own power plant. As utility companies grew and standards developed, much of the factory equipment that relied on these individual power systems were upgraded or converted to use the increasing reliable power sources that the electrical utility companies provided. Individual factory power plants were eventually abandoned and dismantled.

I see a similar parallel occurring with the Information Revolution. As reliability and standards develop, I believe that the server room / datacenter will eventually fall away as a requirement that every business must develop and maintain as utility solutions or commodity services providers become mainstream.

While it is comforting to think that we have control of our systems, we really don't. if someone is earning a living trying to compromise our systems, they probably have more time available to reach their goal than I have to preventing them. For most businesses It’s a cost vs risk calculation. I think that given the option, would prefer to share security resources and costs with a larger pool whenever possible as opposed to hoping that all the suggestions from experts and best practices will cover all my bases.

My career has progressed from feeling the need to review the internals of every server I installed SQL Server on, to never having seen the cities where most of the systems I manage reside. So in a way, the SQL Servers that I set up and manage in Virtual Machines, on equipment in a city I’ll probably never visit is as tangible as a cloud. In any case, I just need to be sure that I have tested plans to recover these systems when there is a failure.

Most businesses maintain backup generators for emergency lighting and to support critical operations, many businesses will still maintain some backup systems or parallel services with service providers to support many of their critical business systems.

Whatever catchy name someone wants to call it, I believe that the email, file, web, application, and database services abstraction is a natural progression in the evolution of the Information Revolution.