I think first of all that the article is not very well written - in particular the paragraph Larry cited. However, if you consider that a client may wish to move applications and data from one cloud provider to the next, it's no different than wanting to move your inactive records from one storage vendor to the next. And standardization would certainly help that. 

Now, if a SaaS vendor wanted to move its applications and YOUR data from e.g. Google to Amazon, that gets a bit trickier, but I don't know that it's any different than your outsourced records storage vendor moving your records from one warehouse to another. As long as *they* know where your stuff is and can communicate that, and can produce your records upon request, and otherwise meets your requirements for security, confidentiality, etc., I don't see any impact to your ESI mapping. After all, if you have a SAN, you cannot point to the box your file is stored on; even if it's a file share, you may not know which disk(s) it is stored on. Electronic records will always involve a certain amount of abstraction and cloud computing is just the next step in that process. 

Larry is of course spot on about contracts, SLAs, etc. and cloud computing is definitely not mature enough yet for every organization to feel comfortable with. But there are ways to do it securely even today and as standards are developed for how data and applications are stored and managed it will become easier to do so. 

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

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

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