In an interesting article I just read, some idiot CTO suggests we stay out of the computer cloud for a while, and suggests that Amazon’s elastic computing cloud may be inadequate for mission critical stuff… Well mr CTO numpty, with all due respect stuff off.
Here is the article:
Now in my experience and prior to a few days ago, I would still have disagreed slightly with this stand point, however mr CTO has not done his research. Amazon now supply persistent storage that you can attach to your server… nice. This means that you can store all your mission critical data persistently, rebuild an instance of your server from a backup inside 10 minutes, and then reattach the storage.
Even before this revelation in technology, mr Chief Officer, a good backup policy would have saved any data from your point case, and just an outage is hardly the end of the world.
Now I’m not suggesting we run out and put mission critical stuff in ‘the cloud’, what I am suggesting is that the solution can be as stable as, say, a £1,000,000 service contract with IBM. If you are that worried about a server failing and seriously cannot handle an outage of an hour in a year, or don’t have the ability to use separate server zones, or cannot put together a load balancing cluster then possibly you might want to look outside the IT area for a career.
This chap seems to have a similar perspective, but again, I cannot believe that a company does not have a decent backup procedure, that’s just plain stoooooopidity! The P2P cloud discussed is to distributed services what “Web 2.0″ was to the internet – a rehash of an old technology that worked really well all the way back then, and they finally find a use for it. Way-to-go guys, My commodore 64 may be usefull again!!! 
I would suggest that the reason it is being suggested that the cloud is not ready yet, is because companies like Citrix and IBM have not yet found a way to use this really cheap service, completely destroy it and charge a fortune for it… Dunno, just a thought.