Network World has a report about online storage site, The Linkup, losing customer data and then the company shut down in the aftermath. A wave of finger pointing follows, but if you're thinking about moving your data to the cloud (offsite platforms hosted and managed by a third party), this should make you think.

CrossTech Media's own Nick Saber recently had a problem with Google Apps. In a single day, Google shut down Nick's access to all the various Google platforms. It wasn't that he couldn't reach his email (there are backups). The problem was that Nick couldn't see his calendar, his stored documents, the office's chosen chat system, picture storage, and more. And this was a mostly personal-use account.

It's not that cloud computing is bad/wrong. It's not even that one should go back to a fully self-managed platform. But these types of stories should point to two next steps: evaluate the quality of your cloud providers, their service contracts, and how they resolve trouble reports. And second, maintain your own backups locally to complement the systems built into the clouds. Several quality managed platforms and vendors exist, and there are definite opportunities to reduce expenses and improve your business processes. But moving into the clouds isn't something one should do without a bit more planning and consideration.

Our October 9th executive event, The Next Data Center, will feature further conversations about this. One featured sponsor, Qwest Communications, offers a variety of hosted services offerings. Learn from Qwest and others how they would approach a safe and secure cloud environment, and the alternatives. As this moves from the theoretical into standard operations, we'll all need to learn from collective experience.