It’s fair to say fiction writers have neglected the colocation business, not recognizing the potential, I guess, for gritty suspense among server cabinets and the dangerous possibilities of a day on raised flooring. Their loss. Connelly made it quite real, and quite creepy, in his novel that features one particularly diabolical colo admin using the Internet and identity theft to conceal his evil deeds.

The only possible explanation for so few data center dramas is that thriller writers haven’t been comfortable with the tricky terminology in the colo game. If they’re Modern Infrastructure readers, they no longer have that excuse.

The new MI issue takes a hard look at IT outsourcing and efficiency, and offers a primer on colocation, managed services, dedicated hosting, cloud providers and similar services. It’s a useful guide for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because people often use the terms interchangeably – and incorrectly.

Take a look for yourself. See if you are properly speaking the language of shared infrastructure and fully understanding the distinctions between managed services and hosted services. We think it’ll take the mystery out of it for you. It’s best, after all, to leave the mysteries to those thriller writers.

The prolonged downturn in the global economy leaves IT in an ongoing squeeze. Do more, IT departments are told, but do it with slimmer budgets and smaller staffs.

Mike Sargent, general manager for enterprise management at software vendor CA, describes this predicament as the new normal. “The effective demands on IT are going up exponentially, and it is under massive pressure to keep costs under control,” he tells Alex Barrett in the new issue of Modern Infrastructure.

Automation and outsourcing are two ways that can help to ease that pressure, and Alex talks with Sargent and other industry insiders about where they see those efforts paying off.

But just how long can these tricks continue to work? Is there a point where outsourcing is maxed out? When will there be nothing left to automate? And how long can this new normal last?

But the world marches on, and although Modern Infrastructure’s first cover story of 2013 starts on a science fiction angle, this issue is all about gradual and realistic progress. Despite the exciting developments of the past ten years, in this economy companies aren’t eager to take massive risks, meaning that IT and the related job market should continue to evolve slowly. In his column this month, Jonathan Eunice stresses that 2013 is not the year that everyone magically migrates to the cloud, because infrastructure ownership still has its own benefits. Instead, he advises us to “Say hello to the hybrid cloud.”

What’s your take? Is the cloud a harbinger of doom for IT as we know it, or will IT continue to transform at a steady pace?

Enjoy this and other stories in the new issue, and have a happy 2013.

As cloud computing matures, we’ll be watching to see how these issues play out. Will enterprises be able to build true redundancy across clouds? Are systems such as Chaos Monkey (for Amazon Machine Instances) and Cassandra (for distributed databases) improving stability or just adding another layer to management?

In the latest issue of Modern Infrastructure, senior news writer Beth Pariseau looks at these questions and the prospects for business continuity in the cloud era. What about you? Is your organization reluctant or eager to invest in this technology?

Instead of using an expensive “dashboard” product or relying on pagers, what if you could get updates via Twitter? VMware has demonstrated mapping server relationships with Socialcast, but what if you could set up TweetDeck to watch multiple systems or metrics in real time?

This is no more kludgy than what many administrators have already done, so why not use social media (which everyone’s already checking anyway) to manage machines in the data center?

But it’s a little tougher to adopt a bold attitude toward risk when $5 million is at stake, as Steve Gunderson illustrates in this month’s From the Front Lines on the high price of designing a data center without investing in sufficient expertise. The company in question tried something new, but they cut the wrong corners and ended up paying for their self-reliance.

This month’s Modern Infrastructure is all about balancing on the knife’s edge between, in the words of our editor-in-chief, “forward-looking and foolish.” Planning the data centers of the future requires just such a balance, between useful innovation and costly oversights. In your data center design projects, when do you forge ahead, and when do you take a step back and ask the experts?

Read the entire issue of Modern Infrastructure (free registration required).