First of all, the electrical grid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid) is by this point a pretty well har

First of all, the electrical grid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid) is by this point a pretty well hardened and redundant infrastructure in major metropolitan areas. I do think that for startps and smaller companies, receiving and paying for storage/compute power like electricity is the way to go. But back for a moment to the A/B example. My point here is really with companies that are dealing with sensitive information. Let A = JP Morgan & B = Morgan Stanley. JP Morgan, I would guess (somewhat wildly) probably owns and operates in the neighborhood of 18,000+ servers. At least half of those (roughly), probably contain mission critical programs and data. The other half, that don't contain mission critical data per se, probably contain either 1) backups of mission critical applications for emergencies, 2) email, documents etc of every single employee (sensitive data). Now as long as JP gets the electricity that it needs who care where it comes from? It just needs to run its business. But the moment it lets important data out the door, all bets are off. Who accessed what? Is the network secure? Is the building physically secure from intrusion and corporate espionage? Does Morgan Stanley now know the JP automated trading strategies? and so on... Which is why I would say its not a no brainer to simply give up control of server infrastructure.