sfx2000
Part of the Furniture
I could list a half dozen services that ceased to exist in my own company post-merger. Not everybody does it but it's not uncommon either. And when you say stick with the Tier 1 brands, that's who I'm talking about. I've worked on M&A deal for some highly recognizable names in the industry. And I've seen what some enterprises would call "essential services" go the way of the dodo after a merger (or even a C-level housecleaning).
I've seen the M&A activities, and also the move forward - from a macro-scale it's all about cost savings - those legacy services do cost a lot of money, and they've moved into the 'cost-center' realm, and the all-IP core is where things are moving forward - in the US, we have a huge amount of bandwidth buried in the ground thanks to Qwest, Global Crossing, and to a lesser extent MCI and ATT-LongLines - so the fiber is there - but it's TDM/Circuit oriented - and there are businesses that have worked to that end - but there's also a lot of dark fiber that companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Level3, Akamai, Cloudflare, etc... they've leveraged into that space in a big way - and I should add other major telco's like Tata, Reliance, China Telecom, Verizon - big bandwidth is a very different world than what we see as basically end-mile users..
I don't have issues with the cloud at a high level - we're awash in bandwidth, and the cloud at a carrier level can afford flexibility with how they deploy bandwidth and capabilities... with NFV/SDN, things can scale and rebalance as needed to keep things running well..
I do worry about security and seperation of services inside the clouds offered by Azure and Amazon Web Services (along with others), but these are the same concerns that we have with self-hosted services - security needs to be designed in, and trust me, there's a lot of folks that are doing it right - but there's quite a few doing it wrong as well, but they've been doing it wrong on their own hosted servers...
It's the last-mile and how we move up the stack into Applications - and there, a lot of things offered to the end-user are basically free - which is a concern as someone once put - pay for a product and you own it, get it for free and the product owns you..
We worry now about things like Windows 10 from MSFT, and Google's OnHub, along with the Amazon's strong lock on what we want to buy - as end-users, this is a legit concern.
FWIW - I'm actually happy that Apple seems to find a way to screw up cloud services and social, over and over again... I can't speak for others, but basically I find many of their services unusable and as such, basically don't use them - iCloud for me is "Find my Device" and an Email spam-dropbox...
Seriously though - if you're using Netflix or Hulu (or many other media providers), you're in the cloud... same goes with many other things that we consider as a single URL, it's going into the cloud as well - buy something from Amazon or Alibaba - it's in the cloud... login into Twitter, Facebook, etc.. you're in that cloud as well...
Don't fear the cloud - understand it...