I don't think the question is whether it can be trusted or not. That's pretty ambiguous and, as mentioned, you can't really put 100% trust in anything. Also, th

I don't think the question is whether it can be trusted or not. That's pretty ambiguous and, as mentioned, you can't really put 100% trust in anything. Also, the meaning of 'the cloud' has become diluted, seeing it's now analogous with pretty much anything web based. We might as well call it "scalable, distributed and virtualized computing" or something. The question, for me, comes down to education and understanding. The term 'the cloud' is relatively nascent, but the basic underlying principles are not really that new, just more evolved. The cloud is as secure and reliable as you make it. By definition it promotes redundancy, accessibility and scalability. I work on a 'cloud' claims management application and it's targeted at the enterprise (finance/insurance) market, who are notoriously slow to adopt new technology. Trust me, it's a tough audience, but not as tough as you might think. The realization that data can be accessed (and work done) anywhere, at negligible cost with existing hardware is simply too compelling for any forward thinking company. Quite simply, the pros seriously outweigh the cons - whereas the opposite is true for traditional client-server technology.