With the rapid adoption of cloud services and an increasing number of cloud infrastructure and platform services, we have witnessed an explosion in complexity and unmanaged risk in the mission critical industry.

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.

While in-store come-ons don’t actually happen in the IT realm, an analog sort of does.  If you’re a small or midsize business poised to move to the cloud and you’re working with a clean slate, your choices are fairly clear from the get-go, even if the answers are neither obvious nor universally applicable.

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

The increased prevalence of corrosion in storage tanks was first noticed in 2007, shortly after the introduction of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) biodiesel blends. Intense study has followed, trying to answer the questions of what has caused the increase in corrosion and how to mitigate it.

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.

My last article, “The Critical Facilities Labor Market,” discussed the current shortage of qualified and experienced labor. It focused on how the labor shortage came about and how it is impacting the overall industry. Basically, it honed in on the problem and associated causes.

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.