Just read the article - a couple of key points and questions. 

1. Cloud computing is not Saas which is not Web 2.0 which is not ASP etc.
That's like saying records management is archiving is discovery is document
management. There are the same nuances between the IT buzzwords as there are
in the IM buzzwords. For example, cloud computing typically is massively
scalable - think hundreds of millions of users on Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.
Amazon's S3 storage service is cloud computing. SaaS is more about the
business model of how the application functionality is provided. Many SaaS
solutions do not use cloud computing and vice versa. Zoho and Exchange
Online are SaaS. 

There is some risk to SaaS, CC, etc., just as there is risk to the
traditional software model or to keeping everything in paper in the
basement. The costs tend to be lower initially and while higher over time,
they are also spread out over time because most of these solutions use a
subscription and/or usage model. 

Compare cloud services to the electricity grid. Nobody could imagine in 1900
outsourcing all of their energy needs to "the electricity cloud" - what
happens if it goes down? What happens if the "power line" is cut? What
happens if they jack the prices way up? What Amazon, Google, and the like
are trying to provide is the information services grid. It's more robust
than your internal solution. It doesn't go down - and when it does, as
Google Gmail did this week, it's still more reliable than 99% of corporate
email. Unless you have massively redundant clustered email services
internally, which are quite complex and expensive to provide and therefore
outside the availability for most small- and medium-sized organizations,
Gmail is more reliable than Exchange, Domino, or Groupwise. It's not even a
close call. 

<snip>
The communications networks aren't proven to be robust enough to handle the
traffic of a large number of major companies all attempting to access huge
repositories of information simultaneously.  And A RAID, or SAN or NAS can
only spin up so fast and can't access multiple sectors at the same
time.</snip>

Which leaves what? Optical, which is slower? Tape, which is worse? Paper? In
a disaster that crushes the digital infrastructure, what's the likely
outcome for paper and film? In the event of a major earthquake, which is the
storage model most likely to gain you access to your information if your
building was near the epicenter? Post-Katrina, how quickly were those
organizations whose data was stored locally back online? 

So sorry, but this is not just " another attempt for the IT vendor community
to try and prove "anything you can do we can do better"". It's a fairly
radical change in technology architecture and approach that a lot of
companies are exploring as means to give them more robustness and
scalability at lower cost while still providing required compliance and
security capabilities. Records managers need to consider how to manage these
environments rather than simply rail against them. 

R/S, 

Jesse Wilkins
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