How Secure is the Cloud?

How secure is your current system? How can you expect that by adding another layer of exposure to this system, you are making it more secure? Think of the random nature of the outages faced by Twitter and Facebook- can your mission-critical operations survive such temporary outages? What happens when you face a regional power outage, as happened not too many years ago in the Northeast- locally, you can maintain functioning with backup power generators- how many levels of backup power generators do you need to maintain the same functionality when you are relying on others to maintain service during crises?

Cloud computing sounds like such a bad idea all around, for most applications. There are some applications where it makes sense- like astronomical research, or medical research, where large databases can be shared and studied by multiple users; or social networks, where loss of service is more an aggrevation than a crisis. But mission-critical, or highly proprietary? Why don't you just let your car mechanic perform brain surgery on you? The results would be the same, but the mechanic would finish the job quicker...

A link to a discussion of this issue published by NY Times:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/is-our-data-too-vulnerable-in-the-cloud