[samtheman]

You make some good points but here’s what I take away from those articles:

1. More than one writer said something along the lines of “this is the beginning of what we’re going to be seeing”
2. It points to a more general problem of lack of care and respect for MY data... no one has as much care and respect for MY data as I do... how could that ever be otherwise?

And BTW, there have been recent stories of hacked data at Amazon.

[Dan Nunn]

I don't disagree. We may well see data breaches from cloud hosting providers, as well as unplanned outages (the great AWS outage of April 2011), so I definitely recommend evaluating your own faith in the providers of cloud services when making that decision of whether to, and who to, use. Part of the reason I chose Amazon was their devotion to the industry and their industry-leading technology, I would also recommend Rackspace for their devotion, and Microsoft if you're in a .NET shop. I stayed away from Google due to their App Engine being an almost afterthought, and wouldn't recommend the smaller providers for the reasons you mentioned.

But realistically, a lot of this could happen at any shared hosting environment, so there isn't much new here. The biggest innovation in cloud computing was the higher-level abstraction layer that allows users to programmatically provision services (add servers remotely, route traffic based on network conditions, etc), due to the incorporation of virtual machines. Remote hosting has been around since the internet was founded by Al Gore years ago, and as JimRob referenced in post 88, is employed by FR.

But you're right, only you will have the utmost respect for your data. If I was consulting users and data confidentiality was tantamount; well, you're only really going to be able to do that yourself. However, with FR data, posts are already public, passwords should be hashed, the only super-sensitive data I could think of would be email addresses or IP addresses.

Besides, they even have a separate provisioned datacenter for government networks.

The cloud isn't for everyone, but a lot of people discount it for reasons that aren't entirely accurate.