Summary
This article does a good job of explaining what cloud computing is to non IT professionals: a messy system of thousands of web servers scattered around the world..
It may be interesting to get to know the where/when/how our data is managed, but that is not a crucial point.
Likewise with financial scums, one should better worry about sloppy and fraudulent usage of the cloud, and prepare for the storm before it hits.
Analysis
This article does a good job of explaining what cloud computing is to non IT professionals: that is an apparently messy (cloudy) system of thousands of web servers scattered around the world in safe and technologically advanced data centers.
The author, Mr. Sutter, correctly finds out how suspicious it is not to have a clear indication of where our data is, who manages it, how and when. It is all nice to have free data space for documents, video and pics, but he prefers to keep a copy on his laptop.
The thing is that, for the time being, it is big and honest multinationals that support cloud computing. When your documents, videos and pics are stored somewhere by IBM in US, no matter how this is managed and who deals with it, one can be pretty sure these files will not be lost, corrupted or given out to unauthorized parties.
We are living the phase where most market players have an interest in luring clients to move their data into the cloud, so all is neat, professionally handled, and clean.
But that weather is going to change: for the worse. When the market picks up, large multinationals will shift more and more to data centers scattered around the world, probably owned by third parties. By that time data will comprise business documents, and will have some degree of required confidentiality as well as marketability.
Soon price pressure will drive less-than-professional market players in downgrading operational and security standard practices, and next thing you know your data reaches a competitor, or is subject to fraudulent usage. The funny thing about clouds and systems is that this will hardly be anyone's fault, rather the system's inherent slack.
One could argue that only non valued data can get into the cloud over the long term: all confidential and sensitive information should stay firm on the ground.
