chrisn-585491 (10/16/2013)
Sigh! Four years and folks are still trying the upsell the cloud. Maybe the NSA is offering an additional bonus? 😛Most of us who've been in this business awhile understand the benefits of various technical and business solutions. The "cloud" or service providers work better in some circumstances and for a sub-set of institutions. We still have the same issues we had four years ago: bandwidth, service, accountability and security.
And security is a much larger elephant considering the events of the last year. It's apparent that an insider or an government agency can totally damage an organization. Why do you want yet another company and their employees/contractors to have access to your data by outsourcing it? You're increasing the liability and attack surface.
Perhaps the NSA is, but not to me.
You have good arguments here, but those apply to some domains and not others. I would argue there are a good domain of services and businesses that don't capture PII, medical, financial, etc. information. They provide a simple service, like a grocery list or a mapping tool, or a game. In many cases, the issues with the cloud aren't as important as the scale and reach.
The issues you brought up are important, but not necessarily an issue for some domains of services.