> I've never understood why so many companies are comfortable giving Amazon such leverage over their business infrastructure. You have to be a pretty big compa

> I've never understood why so many companies are comfortable giving Amazon such leverage over their business infrastructure. You have to be a pretty big company in order to not let another company have leverage over your infrastructure. Hosting your networked servers in your own office? You're depending on Verizon, AT&T or Qwest, even if those are not the companies selling you your pipes. Co-locating your servers, getting feeds from 2-3 carriers, while doing BGP with your high-end Cisco routers? You're depending on the hosting facility, such as Telehouse. So you want to survive a blackout in one section of the US. Now you need at least two server facilities. Your remote facility needs at least one full-time tech. Corporate infrastructure can get in the way as well. Your division of the conglomerate is in San Francisco, but another division is in New York. Perfect, your division's remote IT person can work out of that division's New York office. But the conglomerate might be structured so that is not really possible. The other division may as well be another company. So a small company can't afford to do this. A big company can get so big that it's not feasible either. If the big company has one central IT department that all divisions use, it becomes more feasible, but how many big companies only have one centralized IT department? Even if such a creature exists - the big company buys a small company, or merges with another big company - boom, two IT departments again.