I've never been much of a "get on the bandwagon" type of guy, typically the more somebody tries to sell a thought/idea/concept to me the more skeptical I become as I truly believe that really good ideas don't need the hard sell. Cloud computing / storage is one of the latest pushes of these, the big boys in computing (MS, Google, Amazon, etc) push the cloud very strongly and I certainly understand why that is from their perspective ... the Application Service Provider model has always been lucrative but the cloud raises the bar considerably for some. These companies are attracted by cloud computing because each already had the infrastructure in place and so leveraging that infrastructure to increase revenue also serves to decrease operational costs ... making it an even more profitable solution than it first appears and more profitable than would be for new players without the existing infrastructure. But is good for them good for you?

The benefits of cloud computing are many and significant. The cloud brings a technical solution to the table that very few corporations and organizations could feasibly bring to the table for themselves. Using the cloud provides at least six benefits worthy of consideration from dramatically lowered startup and administration costs to highly available and scalable solutions. These benefits are, for the most part, very expensive and complex technologies to provide ... but the cloud makes these technologies accessible to all businesses at a very attractive, low initial cost.

So, with all those benefits you'd think I'd be behind cloud computing, but I most definitely am not as it applies to Enterprise Content Management. The plain and simple truth is that use of cloud computing comes with a loss of ownership, sovereignty over the application data, and a real potential for a loss of privacy as well. The proof of this statement comes straight from the headlines:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/11/wikileaks-amazon-denial-democracy-lieberman

The "Cole's Notes" version is that Amazon shutdown Wikileaks' cloud services basically because they were asked to (perhaps threatened in some way, we'll probably never know the full truth) by a US politician (note, not law enforcement, not the government, just a politician albeit a high-profile one). They said it was because their Terms and Conditions didn't allow for "Illegal activity" using their services, but it wasn't and still isn't at all clear whether Wikileaks has broken any laws. No matter what you believe about Wikileaks' activities, they haven't been charged with any offense at all, let alone tried and convicted; there at least seems a genuine belief that they were not and are not breaking any laws and so wouldn't and shouldn't have expected to see their services denied (though I'm sure they were not so naive in reality).

The T&Cs from all cloud providers will all have similar language that essentially take away virtually all rights to the content stored on their services from the client (and I suspect that many include all data transmitted over their network and all data stored within active memory)  and provide little real guarantees of service. Arguably the rights must be taken away for the model to work, the whole idea of cloud computing is to achieve economies of scale and that only happens by treating all content more or less identically so that administering more of it is cheaper not more expensive.

It is highly unlikely that any large corporation will ever allow themselves to provide some cloud or cloud-like service that didn't provide some sort blanket, nearly unconditional right toward and about that content. To offer the services they HAVE to be able to share, replicate, globally distribute, move, and at times view and even alter the content; that is virtually what you want out of the service. But the act of doing that could make them legally liable for that content in at least some jurisdictions, the Internet is not a common carrier (or more correctly, ISPs are not common carriers) and there is no presumed privacy with the technology. We are only just beginning to see that email (not Internet use but specifically email) is being looked at as private communication, but as it stands right now it does not have the protection of either paper mail or a telephone conversation. Even if a corporation were interested in providing such a service without unrestricted rights, it is even less likely that they would be able to obtain business insurance to do so.

The point is that these T&Cs must be agreed to in order to use the cloud and thus you will lose control just as Wikileaks lost control. That doesn't necessarily mean it will ever affect you or your corporation the way it did Wikileaks but their case does dramatically illustrate just who has the real control. The point of ECM is to be able to manage the risk that content inherently brings to the table and to do that then all content must be 100% controlled by the ECM program. It is abundantly clear that it is impossible to control everybodies' behaviour and we also know that we are inherently dishonest beings so no matter how clean and appropriately run a corporation is, there will be some employees who will attempt dishonest activity. If that dishonest activity is found within the Cloud, then what might have been an internal matter could become public and even disrupt business.

The cloud has it's uses but only with public information, everything else is just too risky and must stay within a corporations virtual and physical control.