Cloud computing is still a very confusing topic for many. If you think, like techies do, that cloud computing is a technology that enables rapid scalability of information systems, then it doesn't mean you have to leave your privacy in the hands of the big three. You can run cloud computing within your firewall and still reap the rewards.
Unfortunately, the marketing bandwagon has morphed cloud computing into a technology that must be outsourced. This isn't always true. I work for a hybrid cloud company that enables systems that span the corporate data center and the outsourced data centers.
Sometimes corporate, or even personal data, is private, and sometimes it is public. You have to decide for yourself which info must be kept on your own systems and which can be outsourced. Does it really matter if your product catalog is running in the Rackspace Cloud or on a machine in at your office? It's probably better to be at Rackspace. Customers are still accessing the data from the internet. Why worry about your corporate network going down or the server crashing? Leave it to the experts.
But maybe your R&D or your employee benefit database could be retained locally. It's not a rip & replace sort of scenario. Sometimes it may be, perhaps for the smaller IT shops, or SMBs that don't have infrastructure of their own. For them, cloud computing is freedom and power. SMBs want to focus on running their business, not running a rack of servers.
There is still a lot of FUD to overcome. If you're a technology person and you've implemented scalable systems the old way, with your own servers, or colocation, or whatever and then done the same kinds of systems using cloud computing, it's really unbelievable the difference between the two. Technology people are so much more productive when they don't have to worry about maintaining the physical guts and they can concentrate on the software.
Of course, this means that those people who maintain the guts at big companies are really going to push back on Cloud Computing, because it threatens their jobs. If IT shops don't have their own infrastructure, then they don't have any job for infrastructure people. Work forces are going to shrink and those individuals who feel powerful because they do little work with a lot of people under them are going to be afraid.
Cloud computing is going to shift that equation where those who do more with fewer people by more effectively leveraging scalable technologies are going to thrive in this market. It's very difficult to fight faster, cheaper, and better and cloud computing is all three.
The risk to privacy is overblown. If companies are afraid of losing control of their data, they'll implement cloud computing like systems, "Fogs" or "Private Clouds" or something of that sort and manage it themselves.
Really though, for the consumer, nothing is changing. If they use software as a service or online email or something like that, it doesn't matter to them if they are using "cloud computing" or their software is running on a single machine out there at a colocation facility. They don't know the difference. Most consumers will never know the diffference and they don't care, why should they?
This is actually one of the risks to cloud computing. The marketing push to call it "anything on the internet." To them, it's the same thing we've been selling that for decades and now there really is something different going on and we are losing the essence of that difference to the sales and marketers who are trying to capitalize on the gold rush.
But this transition to cloud computing is inevitable. It might not be called cloud computing after a couple years. Some even argue that Amazon EC2 actually isn't cloud computing at all because it doesn't scale automatically, well, they've added that functionality recently, but before that it was debatable.
Still lots of confusion. Everyone is trying to control the meme and adapt it to their particular business model. It's a war going on right in front of our eyes.