Just from reading media pundits and so called VP of business developments in some web 2.0 startup companies writing guest articles for media outlets. I have been able to observe a lot of criticism and cynicism about cloud services.

I'll list out all the criticisms I've seen and read and in I'll post my response underneath each point for you to judge.

Privacy

The world privacy forum has published a report dated back in 2009 on privacy issues in the cloud. Avaliable here: http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/pdf/WPF_Cloud_Privacy_Report.pdf.

In it, it raises concerns regarding how data on the cloud can be stored in different physical locations around the world, which meant that the neccessary governing laws on privacy in developed countries such as the United States and United Kingdom may not be enough to prosecute service providers that break existing privacy laws.

It also acknowledged that many service providers put their policies regarding user data handling in their terms of service which is often ignored by end-users.

Critics have also raised concerns that by putting data onto the cloud, you're exposing yourself even more to privacy violations as service providers tends to take user privacy lightly. Thus in some cases, user's data could be sold to third parties and/or could be exposed in search engines.

Response

While 'cloud' is a relatively new 'concept' for end-users. Privacy issues raised here are nothing more than an extension of privacy concerns on the internet. I however acknowledge the fact that many service provider's terms of service are simply too long and complicated to read. 

However a phenomenon has already risen for many web users as they have begun to share less and less personal information on the internet than they have previously. This has prompted many privacy savvy service providers to specifically put up banners and words to tell users that their information is safe and secure and will not be sold next to input boxes that service providers would like users to fill.

The solution going forward for many service providers would be to explicitly state what information maybe collected and 'shared'. However a more straight forward solution would be promises from service providers to completely encrypt user's private data in such a way that not even the service provider's internal staff can read.

The technology for such solutions is actually out there already. It is only a matter of time.

Security

On the backheels of privacy concerns that the media had been reporting in the past few years. Security is the new media hype. It is not without it's merit of course that security has risen to the number 1 spot of concern for cloud users. With the past year full of high profile internet related hacks from the likes of Lulzsec and Anonymous. 

This issue ties in with privacy concerns too. As lacklustre security potentially leaves all user's information exposed. A recent mistake by the popular dropbox file sharing cloud utility left users' complete database of files exposed to the world. 

Response

Security should always be the number 1 concern of any service providers. Users should be careful, no matter how popular a given service is, on whether the service provider's approach to security is 'enough'. 

When is security 'enough' and what is 'enough' security you may ask? to put it bluntly, security will never be 100% fool proof, however you can in fact make it at least 90% secure by following simple procedures that all experienced web developers ought to know. But of course, web developers are humans too and the dropbox incident is a perfect example of when developer fails. 

But a service provider would mitigate such risks by having clear defined procedures in regarding to deploying new codes to the servers and in regards to 'staging' cloud services on their own private network before deploying it to the public.

Furthermore, service providers who are serious about security would detail exactly what they do to secure their service. This is still a relatively new publicly exposed danger however, but slowly and surely, we're seeing more service providers doing just that.

At the end of the day, if you care about the data you put in the cloud. Take an indepedent view of their security and judge for yourself whether you trust them. Or, whether extra measures can be taken by the user to enhance security?

Avaliability

One thing that is supposed to be the + point for cloud services recently came back haunting service providers that has switched to relying on cloud infrastructures. 

Several prominent websites have been knocked out for days recently as Amazon AWS' North America data centres suffered downtime. This isn't the first time Amazon AWS has suffered issues, many people have had issues with promises of 'persistent' storage in Amazon AWS's Elastic Block (essentially a 'cloud storage' infrastructure). 

As Amazon is by far the largest and first cloud infrastructure provider in the world. When news broke out about the outages, it seems as though the promise of cloud computing has just been flushed down the drain.

Response

Indeed the promise of high-avaliability seems to have been undermined by the outages suffered by AWS. End users however should (eventually) not be bothered by such issues. Service providers have an obligation and incentives to keep their services open (particularly paid ones) at all times. 

As such many service providers, admitted after suffering from lessons of outages, would have begun to create Plan B. Backups that can be deployed in the case that a part of the infrastructure is knocked out. Cloud service providers have the technology to replicate user's data to as many different storage as possible around the world, they also have the technology to ensure their software 'platform' can run on as many different types of servers as possible.

At the end of the day, cloud is relatively new, and the software to run large operations have not matured, as such there could still be outages every now and then. However users can be assured that avaliability will only ever improve. 

Taking a different perspective at this issue, avaliability of a user's computer is actually more likely to falter and when it does, the length of the down-time is far more than cloud services. As such perhaps cloud computing is indeed the better choice?

Performance and data usage

These are two issues that has been raised as after all, the technology to provide cloud services adds a level of complexity that means performance of cloud services generally will be less than those on your operating system. And being on the internet, data usage will increase as more people rely on cloud services. 

However both are issues that are constantly mitigated by improving performance of computers in general and the improvement of internet connection speeds and capacities.

Conclusion

There are undoubtedly issues with cloud computing at this moment in time. As it being a relatively new concept to grasp for end-users. However the issues raised so far are nothing fundamental and certainly most issues raised are not much more of the issues facing every website today. 

I'll leave you with this sentence: We're on the internet. Always be vigilent and responsible for yourself, your actions and your data, only then you'll be garunteed to reap all the rewards of the internet without the side-effects.

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