[Mr. K]

I can’t believe people voluntarily decided to trust putting their company data in unknown locations, on somebody else’s computer.

Where is “the cloud”?

[Fido969]

I remember when the cloud first came out, when is go to professional seminars they were always pushing it. Why? I thought. Seemed like a terrible idea.

[softengine]

So, voluntarily is not necessarily the case. Some software makes it hard to choose anything other than the ‘cloud’. In those instances, use another tool. Truly.

[Albion Wilde]

Where is “the cloud”?

She says it's "out back of Google."

[COBOL2Java]

Where is “the cloud”?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has them all over the world.

In each major metropolitan area, there are at least 2 server farms (more often 3 or more), in disparate sections of the region. They are synchronized so that if one goes down, another picks up the slack.

[SecondAmendment]

> I can’t believe people voluntarily decided to trust putting their company data in unknown locations, on somebody else’s computer.

It can be a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than setting up your own data centers and infrastructure, but there are a lot of caveats :

• You have a solution which actually needs to run 24/7
• The solution is architected to "expand and contract" according to load, i.e. it can go from one server to ten and then down to one as needed automatically.
• You have staff and management who can support this type of solution, and understand there are growing pains with optimization.
• The solution is architected so that it can be switched from one cloud provider to another in a matter of minutes to hours.
• You have a good working relationship with the various cloud vendors used

Its a tall order, but if done properly a 24/7 solution with multi-regional presence can be had at a very reasonable cost.