*> 3) hosting all our data elsewhere gives many of us pause for many reasons.* It should. Don't trust the hype. Understand your requirements and heavily scrutinize any potential offerings.
From a total non-IT/infrastructure/what the hell is that? Perspective, the above is a key point from a business owners perspective, any business owner. In my small portion of the $260 billion cloud services world, I actually use three different services for offsite backup. Then again, I also use physical drives (both platter based and ssd) for onsite backups and offsite backups (they literally come home with me once a week) My data is valuable, especially to ME! It may not have the “value” that a large corporations data has (monetarily speaking) but it is absolutely, positively, 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt EXACTLY as important to my business as their data is to theirs. My point is there are more than two perspectives on the use, trustworthiness, value, etc etc of “the cloud” as I’m sure everyone here knows. But also that the same trust or mistrust expressed in this discussion from the corporate perspective also holds true from the small business perspective (and for me, from the personal perspective) Most of my data I couldn’t care less if it was accessed by outsiders. My brochures and schedules and clip art and all kinds of stuff is part of my daily business and even my invoices and contracts wouldn’t really hurt me if they were seen by outsiders. Not appropriate, but not the end of the world. Other info that competitors could use in business to steal customers or spots or ....you get the point..... I don’t want seen. But I need to know that whether I’m home or at work or my sister or brothers or fathers home (family business) that I could access my data if/when needed. And that in the event of a catastrophe like oh I don’t know Hurricane Sandy, where my land facilities were literally destroyed or heavily damaged, that I could access my backups and data and run my office from another location. Hence the reason I have the physical data onsite, a physical backup onsite, a physical backup offsite, and multiple cloud backups (they’re cheap when talking a hundred to two hundred gigs that a small business may never fill....plus personal stuff fits nicely too!!) so I know my data is accessible. The stuff that’s sensitive is encrypted before being uploaded to the cloud storage, for what that’s worth. I trust most things as far as I can throw them (except Evan, whom I can throw pretty far :p ) Just my take on “my computer” vs “their computer” and how I try to balance both from a small business perspective. I can’t imagine not being able to use our computers and data because our internet connection was down, let alone because someone ELSE’S internet connection was down so to speak. Tony