Phil Wainewright is a consultant with Procullux Ventures and an advocate of "cloud computing" and the "Software as a Service" (SaaS) model. We appreciate his (sometimes pugilistic) declamations on cloud computing, but we came across a paragraph of his this morning that we thought was worth quoting (with some emphasis added).

Yet despite our understandable caution, it is far better to trust the cloud, where security and performance are continuously open to public scrutiny, where costs can be predictably mapped to actual value delivered and where the technology is constantly kept up-to-date for no extra cost or disruption to the customer. Provided the buyer makes proper due diligence and precautions, there is in my view no alternative form of computing that is more trustworthy.