Personally I think the cloud is a solution in search of a problem. Does anyone remember distributed computing?

And what if the cloud service is taken down? Can you run your business without cloud computing for a day, week, month? what is the backup plan when all your cloud data is gone and stolen?

Cloud computing is about as secure and reliable as banking services in India. Cloud computing as it stands today is a step backwards – just like Indian call centres – the difference is banks have enough clout to screw customers over to save a buck, small business do not, so cloud computing is not good for most businesses IMO.

I got a memo the other day that my department was to put together a cost benefit analysis for a move to cloud computing. In this memo were all the buzzwords that has infiltrated every boardroom since the movement started: converged services, reduced IT budgets, I even believe synergy was thrown in there somewhere.

Now a tiny bit of background; we are a medium sized company that makes stuff. The stuff we make has to be kept secret until we make it (<–my security training at work right there).

So here is what I did. I sent an email back to my CEO saying quite simply "Cloud computing could cost us everything". Here is my argument why:

In an age of corporate espionage, information pirates, and hacktivism gone wild why on earth are we going to trust a third party when we don't even trust the majority of our employees? Will the cloud computing company reimburse us for the 15+ years of RD that was stolen? How will they value the bits stolen by man hours or lost profit? How long is that going to take in court? Which one of us is gonna stand at the podium and explain this to our stock holders?

Now I know some of the cloud computing guys are going through every safety measure they can think of to make my assertions sound ridiculous. But let me ask you this: If I told you three years ago that Sony servers would get dropped like a rock and have their customers credit cards would you have believed me? If I had asked you even last year if you believed the governments network could be compromised what would you have said?

The reality is we are losing the security game, instead of "converging" I am convinced our company should be lowering our public footprint. In my humble opinion anyone moving to the cloud should make sure that the computing they are doing is something they wouldn't mind being right out in the public, because that's basically what you are doing.