I would not consider myself too conservative here! Unfortunately, until you get to the specifics of a customer, their application and data, etc. it is hard to have any specific recommendations. It is even more complicated when the panel is flexing between Software, Platform, and Infrastructure as a Service, public/private and hybrid models, etc.

That said, I would agree that for large enterprises, mission critical is not the place to start today although for some SMBs it very well may as their security will many times not be any worse. As you rightly point out, with the right provider, an organization’s security capability may increase when moving to a cloud computing provider. I believe that in the near future this will continue to grow more and more true. For enterprises, however, it is _very_ likely that they may be able to use Cloud Computing for some subset of applications, workloads, or use cases. Amazon is quite fond of citing examples of organizations like the NY Times, Animoto, NASDAQ, and others using the cloud for things such as one-time processing, resource augmentation, functional offload, etc. I think we are just starting to unveil the use cases and more will surface as cloud computing matures.

So, please do not take the comments of the panel as negative on cloud computing or its use by enterprises. As with anything, we must exercise due diligence, understand the risks and rewards, and make sound business decisions once we decide whether a given provider (or internal cloud implementation) is appropriate for a given workload or dataset.

Thanks for your feedback! Love to hear more!

Glenn