Can You Trust the Cloud?

Grazed from Mashable.  Author: Christina Warren.

In the past, one of the primary concerns about the cloud was reliability — could you count on it to be available when you need it? Today, most major cloud offerings are at least as reliable as any other solution. Instead, we’ve seen concerns shift to the "security" of data stored on the cloud. (Thanks a lot, NSA.)  Whether or not you can "trust" the cloud often depends completely on what you are doing and what type of service you are using.

When we talk about the cloud, we’re usually talking about a few different things. First and most commonly, we have consumer or business facing cloud-based applications and services. The most popular example here is something like Dropbox or Google Docs. Rather than running an application off of your computer, you run an instance — usually in a web app (but you can do it using mobile too) directly from the Internet…

The other part of "the cloud" is the broader idea of cloud computing. This is what companies such as Rackspace and Amazon Web Services and Heroku, where you can power applications, databases or tools that you specify, using clustered groups of computers. Instead of having to maintain your own rack of servers to create an application, you can rent time and computing power from companies that will only charge you for what you use…

Read more from the source @ http://mashable.com/2013/08/30/cloud-trust/