Dark Clouds Ahead

In some ways. this list gets tougher to write each year, as cloud-enabling technologies mature, cloud providers become more sophisticated, and overall uptime and stability, for the most part, improve.

Providers are adding nines to their SLAs; at the same time, enterprises are rushing to virtualize their on-premise infrastructure to create dynamic, private clouds that can rapidly scale into public infrastructure.

While outages aren't as prevalent and pervasive as they were in years past, the harm they cause business customers might be greater than ever.

The burgeoning number of mission-critical workloads migrating to cloud infrastructure amplifies the damage caused by even a short service interruption. Each outage, no matter how quickly remedied, erodes credibility in the technology and dissuades greater adoption.

For more on the "coolest" of 2015, check out CRN's Tech Midyear In Review.