Enterprise customers and Cloud Adoption

A big fear among enterprise customers who want to adopt cloud is that

1. Is my data secure?
2. What if this site goes down for 3-4 hours?
3. What if this startup shutdown business, what will happen to my data?

Recent downtimes from big companies as shown below instills a fear among mission critical busineses wanting to adopt cloud.

1. Microsoft http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/09/microsofts-cloud-briefly-evaporates-leaves-up-to-365-million-users-without-access-for-four-hours/
2. Amazon http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/04/21/amazon-ec2-goes-down-taking-with-it-reddit-foursquare-and-quora/
3. Google App Engine http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/09/google-explains-its-google-docs-outage/

While moving to cloud makes sense economically but having one bad day can make people go back to traditional methods of manging own infrastructure. Think of a hospital storing all records in cloud, it cant afford a 2-3 hour downtime. There is a better solution to this and its by adopting the hybrid model and companies that will do it successfully will see far more growth in enterprise area. The idea is to have an on-premise cloud that syncs to the real cloud. This way even if the real cloud is down or goes out of business, the on-premise instance ensures business continuity.