A recent Ponemon Institute study reports that a significant majority of 127 cloud-computing service providers surveyed believe it is their customers' responsibility to secure the cloud, not theirs.

Or, as Andrew Schrader, national sales director of e-mail hosting and services cloud provider AppRiver says more colloquially, when it comes to security, "the buck stops with you."

AppRiver is hardly unique. Amazon Web Service's Terms and Conditions, for example, state that it will "have no liability...for any unauthorized access or use, corruption, deletion, destruction or loss of any of Your Content or Applications."

"Cloud," says Bruce Lynne, managing partner of Financial Executives Consulting Group, "is just a fancy word for outsourcing." And, as smart CFOs know, when a company outsources, it sheds work, not responsibility.

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