"The cloud isn't the ultimate answer, and you ought to have a backup plan, which should include the ability to move your services back to your own data center."

This is a strange and rather unrealistic statement. If a company moves to the cloud, they are (99.99% of the time) sold on the cloud from an economic standpoint. So what IT Director is going to invest in Cloud computing AND have to maintain a Data Center 'just in case'. Try pushing that one past a CEO and you will either be laughed out of the office, or worse, fired for being slightly braindead as you double or triple IT costs.

Cloud computing suffers from the same lack of vision that has plagued technology for decades. It all sounds like a great idea until you really get under the hood and realize what you are giving away, and worse, what the unknowns are. As much as it has application in some limited implementations, generally its more like the Palm Pilot or other such "change the world" inventions - that never changed the world.

Think of it this way - suppose you use an on-line backup service in your personal or professional life. Have you read the fine print in the agreement? Do you know that if they lose all your data they have lawyers who have already insured you cannot hold them liable? Does that sound like a "good idea"? Of course, they didn't tell you that when you joined up. It all sounded so good until the inevitable struck.

If you go to the Cloud, be darn sure you read the fine print - as many companies have discovered, its not worth the risk because although they are happy to sell you, at this point they are not that interested in supporting you in a crisis, because of course, there never will be any crisis. Yeah, right... That surely has never happened in technology...