Signing on with the industry’s largest players – the companies with the vast networks, the far-flung data centers, the affections of Wall Street and the brand recognition that so many smaller organizations covet – is both logical and, sad to say, sometimes not so much.
It’s a trust-but-don’t-bother-to-verify situation, since it’s assumed the mega providers are too big to fail. Except they’re not. Here, however, it’s not a question of a provider going out of business, but of going dark and going down. So while their businesses may not fail, yours might. An ill-timed outage could do some serious damage.
In the previous century, no one ever got fired for buying IBM, but that was then. Suffice to say, today’s strategic IT purchase decisions need to be informed by some level of risk aversion and caveat emptor. No matter how large the provider’s market cap.
