Fire up the Wayback Machine, and let’s travel back to the year 1996 — the time when the Telecommunications Act paved a competitive pathway for traditional phone companies and internet businesses.

Whether an organization starts out with a modest, on-premises IT infrastructure or uses a public cloud provider to meet its data and networking needs, it will eventually reach a point where that solution is no longer viable.

If you’ve been listening to industry chatter, then you’ve probably heard murmurs about the death of the data center.

If you’re like me, you travel a fair amount for work, and that means you spend time sitting in airport concourses waiting for your flight, waiting for your flight to be rescheduled, and waiting for information on alternate flights when your flight is cancelled.

In April, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report to Congress on the current status of the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) — the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) directive to optimize and consolidate data centers to deliver better services to the public while increasing return on investment (ROI) to taxpayers.

There are pros and cons to everything, and colocation is no exception. Though it may be a relatively new concept to the data center world, it definitely wasn’t born yesterday. Other industries have been building their business models around the idea of colocation for quite some time.

I’m sure you noticed a different face on this page, but I still want to take up a few lines here to introduce myself. My name is Amy Al-Katib, and I am the new editor-in-chief for Mission Critical magazine.