[Reeses]

What I don't understand is what the advantages are to moving an organization's data "to the cloud" where hands unknown have access to it.

Companies increasingly outsource their IT to foreigners so they don't really care. It's all about price. A virtual data center of 100 servers can be created in the cloud in 2 days, while the track record in many IT shops is 2 months to provision a single physical server. The price of cloud computing is amazingly dirt cheap. Eventually companies will move to inhouse or more local cloud infrastructure.

Here's an intro to Amazon web services: http://aws.amazon.com/resources/webinars/

[Jim Robinson]

We’ve been huge users of cloud based technology for a very long time. I can remember working for weeks and months on systems designs back in the 70’s and 80’s and we’d develope huge complex flow charts with boxes and circles and arrows pointing every which way. But there was always one cloud shaped symbol on the most critical systems chart that was labeled, and then a miracle happens here.