In a recent weekend edition of the #CIOChat tweetchat, the question was raised about what the CIO’s role would look like in five years. The discussion focused on many different areas. One area was that the CIO would become more of a service broker, as more and more applications move to the cloud. The responsibility discussion becomes less about controlling / owning iron / hardware / space, which has been the traditional area of CIO responsibilities. This prompted a secondary question from me: Has the cloud industry reached the point where it is too big to fail? Granted none of the big players in the cloud show any signs of financial trouble, but there was a time when the auto industry and the banking industry could say the same. Have we reached that tipping point? Has the cloud industry become too big to fail and, if it has, what is the impact?