Two Words on Why I do not trust "The Cloud"

TheGlobe.com and igoogle.

You can likely find quite a few more words to say (Microsoft's various dropped features/software/platforms over the years, come to mind), but I spent a lot of my time creating content for both TheGlobe.com, which was the first host of my personal web page, and igoogle, which I have used for about 5 years as my personal portal.  The former has been gone for a long time and the July 3rd announcment from Google now makes the latter soon defunk.  The time I invested in both was for naught.  With the former, I had backups of the content, but with the latter, no such backup can be made.  I have found netvibes.com to be the closest substitute, but I question how much I want to rely on another "Cloud" solution.

I do not trust "The Cloud", because I think it is foolish to trust private companies with your stuff (or if you are a business, another private company with your business' stuff).  The cloud host may go bankrupt, be bought, change strategies, or just be poorly managed.  Too many things can go wrong and your "stuff" is gone.  Google, Microsoft, Apple, have all had such disappointments for their customers and new start ups are even more risky.

In-sourcing is now the strategy de jour in IT, yet we simultaneously talk about moving applications and data storage to "The Cloud".  I was never a big advocate for outsourcing IT, and I am no fan of "The Cloud".  Outsourcing your IT, your applications, your data certainly has advantages, and if their was some standardized or legislated protection to ensure your investment in time, money, and data were protected indefinitely, I would seriously reconsider my position.  [Side note: If a lawyer ends his practice, his files become part of the state archive he practiced in].  Until then, I feel outsourcing IT is like a car dealership outsourcing its sales force.  Yep, they might save some money, but the outsourced sales guy just wants to sells cars,  if he can sell yours great, but if it is easier or more profitable to sell the cars from the dealership down the road, that is what he is going to do.

If you can't afford to own and host your own data and critical applications then I advise you to reconsider whether you should invest your time and your employees time in generating and maintaining them in the first place.  I will make an exception for common applications like Word, Excel, etc. where the application is on "The Cloud" but the data is ultimately stored in-house.  Even then, however, you take the risk that these "Cloud" applications will remain available, affordable, and compatible with your data for the lifetime of that data's usefulness (which, in the analytical chemistry and research world, could be perpetuity).

By the way, the last time I felt this stongly about a bad idea was when I heard about sub-prime mortages.  I took 80% of my money out of the stock market... then it crashed.

Just the humble opinion of someone twice burned!