cfradenburg (6/13/2011)
The fact that we won't have control if the service goes down also doesn't sit well. It's not fun being in a position to say that we don't know when access will be re-established and there's nothing we can do to speed it up.
We don't do any cloud and still can't give time estimates on recovery or do anything to speed things up. All we can do is dig in and start looking. Depending on what we find, we might be able to issue a progress update with a time estimate. If we have to go to vendor support, then we're right back to depending on someone else to identify and resolve the problem.
In general, I think the biggest problem with the cloud is the actual connectivity. We lose our Internet far more often than we lose a database or a server. Of course, we're becoming so dependent on that connectivity that it's loss is not far from being a disaster equivalent to the loss of a server.