Why the cloud will never eat the data center

Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual. Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about? Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers. That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them? It would have to be a data-center change.