Hi Pilar, 

True; yet on the other hand part of the reason billions use Google's search is because they have thousands of the world's best and brightest search experts working on making it better. Same with most of the most massively scalable providers like Amazon, Salesforce.com, eBay, Facebook, etc. 

I submit that as more organizations consider the cloud, and more vendors do too (Microsoft, I'm looking at you) there will be almost Gartner hype cycle-like curve of "hey, we have to do this!"; "hey, we got hacked/they got hacked/it's too insecure"; "hey, what's the big deal?". 

Without diving into the weeds, I will say that cloud computing does lend itself to standardization - the problem is that there are a lot of standards out there. :) It's something that most of them will admit - see e.g. http://cloud-standards.org/ for an example. But again, this is nothing different really from all the security standards out there, or XML dialects for metadata representation, etc. It's a sign of an immature industry/product/solution that will iron itself out. I am quite optimistic for a number of very brief reasons: 
- There are cost incentives for prospective customers and customer incentives for vendors to get it right quickly
- There are any number of similar examples, both positive and negative, from a process perspective including federated search, identity standards, and even ECM standards 
- There is a significant push in federal government in this direction, for example the Apps.gov website (https://apps.gov, "Your source for cloud computing applications designed to help your agency harness the power of today's technology") which I think will help to set standards and address interoperability
- And finally, as I noted in my last post cloud computing does not have to be public. It can be private, inside the firewall, 100% secure just as instant messaging, or microblogging (Twitter-like applications), or wikis, or anything else. If you do it that way, you don't leverage the cloud providers' extensive expertise and massively scalable infrastructure; then again, you may not need all of that and can still benefit from the cloud architecture internally. 

I am starting to work on a longish feature article that is more specific to cloud computing - any questions you or anyone else want answered (besides what it is) are welcome. And those of you with more information on it, feel free to forward it as well. 

Respectfully submitted on behalf of myself and no other company, organization, association, entity, or board of directors,

Jesse Wilkins, CRM
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(303) 574-0749 direct
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins 

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