Much of what's been said is discussed at some length in this IDC article

http://goo.gl/gIMyX

And the title and tag line is pretty much spot on.

Private cloud vs. public cloud vs. hybrid cloud
Which you choose will depend on regulatory requirements, need for speed and more

I used to don my flameproof undies when I posted things like I did in
response to the Register's article, which was really just a PR Newswire
piece for free for SNIA, but no sense in it anymore.  

This is a topic where there are opinions all across the board, and YES, it
DOES matter whether you are public or private, regulated or unregulated  The
problem I see is most of the decisions being made are much more knee-jerk
than that and similar to the article we fervently discussed last week... the
decision is risk vs. cost and of late, cost is why the decision is made.  

The article goes on to say:

Half of IT executives at companies where cloud is or will be adopted say
security is the most important challenge or concern, compared with 42% of
business unit executives surveyed, KPMG says. That's a dramatically smaller
percentage of people concerned with security compared to a year ago, he says. 

But like all surveys, it doesn't give you sufficient data to know if these
are pharmaceutical or toilet paper manufacturing companies, how large the
companies are, what level the 'executives' were at  or if they were
self-proclaimed.  

It also says the most likely direction will be a 'hybrid solution', where
critical applications and information reside in a private/internal cloud
(read= server farm, like now)  and non-essential applications/information
may go to a public or quasi-public cloud.  And I can see this happening, but
as Chris mentioned, we won't know for years what the real cost/s will be. 
And the problem with making a risk based decision is you weigh it against
the current risks- not the potential future risks, which many times are unknown.

There's also an embedded follow-on article that's worth a read:

http://goo.gl/zSSL0

And again, the title and tag line are pretty descriptive:

Public cloud security remains MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
But steady progress is being made to address security concerns of enterprise IT

Someday, cloud security vendors and cloud services providers will convince
enterprise IT that it's safe to move sensitive data and mission critical
apps from the private cloud to the public cloud.

Unfortunately, that day has not yet arrived.

Larry
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