Sean Redmond (2/6/2014)
My third worry is about the importance of connection. One's Internet connection becomes a lot more vital when one's data and servers are remote. I am too accustomed to greedy telecoms' companies, contention and often less-than-perfect line quality to have to rely on it.
I don't think that particular problem is much of an issue, or at least not more of one than we already have--I know from experience that 90% of the stuff my company does is simply impossible without a working Internet connection, and while the business we're in (which involves a lot of remote support for software) may be unusual, I doubt it's all that uncommon. What I guess I'm trying to say is that we're *already* at the point where we're relying on the Internet connection staying up, and so a little more along that path makes little difference.
The main issue is that the Cloud introduces a second unreliability into the mix--not only does your *own* Internet connection have to stay up, so does that of the cloud provider, and they simply haven't shown themselves as being particularly capable of keeping that up. If even the big boys like Microsoft and Amazon can have outages, what chance do we have?