Once upon a time, maintaining service levels was a simple yet difficult matter. At least you knew who was responsible for tuning databases, monitoring infrastructure, and safeguarding access control. The hard part of course was getting everything working as promised.
Service-related issues have been traditionally been dealt with piecemeal, at the perimeter, data center, and inside application and database silos. Even after web applications exposed databases to the outside world, the action that mattered was confined (1) to the application inside the firewall, as the domain of security specialists or DBAs, or (2) out there in the cloud, where it was the service provider's problem.
