I do believe that we will see more and more companies go without their own physical data center footprints and will rely on a more fluid, "cloud" infrastructure.

The initial costs associated with building a data center seem enormous. The maintenance costs also must be staggering. Does anyone know what percent of DC construction/maintenance is spent on redundancies? (e.g. backup generators, UPS, multiple carrier services, etc).

Abstracting away the physical infrastructure for a 'logical' infrastructure (if you will), seems very attractive to me. Particularly if I can have an on-line balance between compute cost and benefit.

One major concern with this approach is security, both physical and otherwise...