The Cloud and you

Two things I can say for sure:

The cloud will fail.
The cloud will get better.

How much any of these two things means to you is dependent on how willingly, and how totally, you embrace the cloud.

Obligatory history lesson starts here:
In 1979 I built my first computer. I soldered the chip-carriers (2, I think) to the tiny PCB, and I soldered all the discretes in their rightful places and I attached power and it had life. A little while later it died (faulty character generator, if you must know).
From then on I had various computers (PET, TRS-80, AMSTRAD 464/664/PCW9512, CoCo, Amiga, Atari, Jupiter Ace, Sinclair Spectrum, IBM XT, IBM AT, a multitude of clones, home-brews and lately Apple Macs.)
All have failed in some way or another.

Lessons learnt from the above history? Technology will fail you (usually when you need it most) and technology improves if it lasts long enough.
Obligatory history lesson ends here.

Therefore, the cloud will fail, but it will improve.

If you are going to use the cloud, decide the level of failure you can tolerate, then use the cloud up to that level, and no more.

One example I know of:
A small business was having server problems - capacity and hardware were below par. The owner, a fairly tech-savvy guy, crunched his numbers and came up with a solution using Amazon. Unfortunately, like a lot of small businesses, the risk analysis was pretty much non-existent, and Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity were words heard once in a management seminar. But, hey, it's Amazon - what could go wrong? Well, Google "Amazon Cloud outage" and you will have a good idea. His business is still going, but some of his customers are tending to use the business less these days, and some are still in "negotiations" over goods supplied late.

Amazon are doing a lot to make sure this doesn't happen again, and so is the small business owner.

Between them, (with lots of hard work) they should be able to put this incident to rest. Out of it will come an improved cloud service, and a chastened, but wiser small business owner.