I absolutely agree; let’s not forget also the string of underwater sea cable failures that hit the Middle East in 2008. 5 underwater sea cables linking the Middle East to Europe developed faults within days slowing Internet in the region to a crawl for days. Such events could be devastating to business hosted on the cloud if no contingency for such a scenario exists!

Despite all the buzz the cloud is generating, the nasty issue that nimbus advocates are glossing over is what happens when a service provider goes down. It’s happened with Google. It’s happened with NetSuite. And you can be certain that it will happen again. Those failures by service providers may be small potatoes, however, compared to the really frightening prospect of an Internet failure. In that scenario, the service providers’ systems would be humming away, but it won’t do their clients any good because they’ll be no Internet to access those systems. Any enterprise that is thinking seriously about the cloud should make sure they have a Plan B that will keep them up and running should their cloud disappear behind the horizon.