The Cloud

Security in the cloud really is an issue, consider e.g. http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/cloudsec.pdf - cross-VM attacks are real, and extremely scary.

(It is possible to get around this; e.g. Tarsnap doesn't trust the server much, and thus gets around the fact that it uses EC2. But that takes careful design and is probably impossible for many applications.)

80s Get rid of all your office mainframes! We can put the power in each client with a PC! Decentralize everything! No more sharing a computer with everyone.

90s Fast ethernet lets us centralize everything. It's way easier to manage a server with a network of clients!

2000s All the clients are cheap and idle. P2P is the wave of the future. Who needs servers?!

2010s Cloud is here! Better to centralize everything in Amazon, Rackspace, <Generic_Cloudservice>. Leave nothing on the client!

My suspicion is that, just like Gmail, all of these cloud systems are backdoored. The only secure solution, which applies especially to businesses with any confidential information, is to encrypt and decrypt on the local client machine.

Sony loses control of tens of millions of cloud accounts and their gaming infrastructure disappears for weeks, and people still think cloud = reliable and safe, huh?

Even giant botnet infections have nothing on that.

There's a place for everything, yes. Definitely convenience to cloud services. I am not of the opinion it should be the default answer.

re: backup, if people are savvy enough to use a DVCS, then making it policy that all business documents are installed in that is a fairly good step for the "files" portion of things. This can be secured in a variety of ways that are community validated (ie, not a security sham like Dropbox turned out to be) and can be hosted in a provider independent manner.