The cloud can be a boon to an organization or it can be an Achilles heel. Market analysis shows that a primary inhibitor to the deployment of cloud services is concerns about privacy and data ownership. Each company has to understand what is at stake when taking their internal applications and their business data outside the firewall. A company needs to look at the long-term viability of the cloud vendor, their infrastructure, the location of the data and any potential issues with storing their data in locations that may have federal, state or local government restrictions for use and transfer of the information.
Two primary examples of industries that may "lose the cloud" are healthcare and government. There are civil and criminal penalties associated with the information that these organizations host and any leakage can put these organizations and their employees at significant risk. Until the risks are mitigated and the controls are in place, these industries may find the risk is not worth the reward of utilizing cloud-based services. In general, publicly-held companies need to assess the regulatory statutes they work under to determine the viability of cloud deployments.
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