I recently attended very interesting Spiceworks Unplugged session in Dana Point, CA. There were three Spice Heads, answering questions from the audience (mostly tech marketers).
One of the first questions was about the use of Cloud and SaaS offerings. All 3 said that they absolutely have no trust in most types of cloud solutions. Their main concern is data security and also reliability of service. No matter how great the cloud service is feature-wise, there's always someone in the server room at the data center who can screw things up and there is absolutely no transparency or any control for it (unlike in-house systems). In a lot of cases you don't even know who has your data and where it is located (or is it already in hands of Chinese hackers right down the street from the datacenter somewhere in India?). Not to mention outages and services failures.
Plus all 3 hate "personal use" cloud services, such as DropBox and iCloud, because they see them as major security hole (data leaks and loss of confidential info).
What do you think? Can you share your thoughts on cloud services and SaaS? Any successes and failures?