With the really big clouds, like Google’s for example, you’ve got data spread across continents. How strong is the encryption of that data as it crosses continents, and might Google or some other large provider be forced to turn over customer data to hostile governments abroad?

With Google, a further concern is that they are heavily into data mining and how much of that customer data is going to be mined?

I had a friend who demonstrated how on one major telecommunications provider’s network, almost all the Cisco routers still had the default passwords and listened to connections on every port, and a command existed that allowed you to clone data destined for a location and send it to third location which allowed you to turn basically any router into a wiretap.

Now add a bunch of cloud data transversing that network and it seems like a recipe for disaster.

If the encryption is reasonably strong, still might the resources of a large cloud be co-opted to break it? Throw enough computer power at any conventional encryption scheme and eventually the keys can be found.

A big concern is let say a big cloud computing company are offering cloud services to business customers in the US.

If that company has a vendor, let say a cloud computing company in India (or any other country) for backing up all their systems overseas.

The question will always be; are “my data” still covered by US privacy laws on their vendor’s systems in India?

And does the company in India have any 3rd party vendor for backing up their data?

This is usually were complex policies comes to play in end-user agreements (which a lot of personal users don’t bother reading).

I think we lose control of the data by using these solutions, even though these “unlimited data” packages are relatively cheap these days.

That’s why I have invested in my own NAS, and in addition I can copy a backup of my data to my friends NAS and wise versa with rsync.

At least this gives me control of my own data and I know all of it is encrypted and unreadable by my friend.

This do require a bit more knowledge than the average end-user, but devices from QNAP and Synology has pretty straight forward GUIs with good documentation.

Cloud computing is indeed very important at presence and in the future as most of our personal stuff and memorise (video, photos, documents and so on) are being uploaded to the cloud and synchronized between all sorts of devices.

Privacy is surely a concern here as well as support.

To many companies out there offering web hotels with “unlimited” data-plans, VPSs and cloud computing, but you never know until it breaks.