Basically as it is configured right now "public clouds" are bad for business and bad for consumers but great for cloud vendors and companies and governments that require a lot of data to be accessible via the Internet.
Putting sensitive financial data in the cloud means losing legal protection of that data. Putting sensitive product information in the cloud means losing control of that data. Business is built on secrets. Unless the cloud can guarantee those secrets a business moving to the cloud completely is out of the question.
On the consumer side, consumers haven't been hit as hard as they might in the future. Basically a "Cloud Katrina" is brewing. People tend to trust Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft when they may be shouldn't. I give some info out on social sites but not my financial information, although it is also probably readily accessible as the people I do business with think security and privacy are things other planets should be worried about.
So who is pushing the cloud, the people who think they will make money off it. The people harmed are not well educated in the harm it can do.
Off shoring IT means less well paying jobs in the U.S.A. It also puts your data in a non-trusted third party. You have to worry about vendor lock in and proprietary formats.
I predict that the cost benefits to cloud computing will disappear as soon as the market has a consumer/business lock in. It happened to physical manufacturing. All the productivity gains and cost savings never made it to the consumer in physical off shoring. It won't make it to the consumer of business consumer in cloud computing either.
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