IMHO, cloud technology is not stupid. In fact, it's brilliant. At last, everything is in one convenient place. Easy pickins.
Again IMHO, the cloud, facebook, linkedin, pinterest, etc. are evil and should be studiously avoided by anybody wishing to have some freedom in the coming years.
Software engineer by trade.
I disagree. It might work for smaller companies that cannot afford the infrastructure cost for hosting their own data servers (start ups too) but unless you have a live back-up with fail-over capabilities you are cooked if there is a massive failure at your off-site data store or any comm center in between you and the store. Case and point Amazon a few weeks ago, people thought the sky was falling and for those types that are totally clouds it was. In the case of a major country wide incident how do you expect to recover when the power does come back when the incident has permanently or semi-permanently disrupted digital comms (EMP, civil war, natural catastrophe). If you don’t physically have your data, you don’t have it, period. Then having it does you no good if you don’t have the hardware to restore it to and get back up and running. What happens when your trusted off site had a employee embezzle and cause it to shut its doors or an incident like a work place shooting and the doors are locked?
Not to mention the security hassles. You want to bet on who is mining your data? The government is a given.
The cloud was implemented to put more control on who is accessing software and not paying for it. It has facilitated the off shoring of development (don’t get me started on this on how it cost more in the long run in crappy code).
Most times simple is better. Host it yourself. If needed you can make your network secure by simply unplugging it from the external connection until breaches are addressed.