In a 2008 IDC survey of 244 CIOs and business executives, more than 63 percent of the respondents rated performance and availability as two of the top three challenges surrounding cloud computing services. And nearly 75 percent said they consider security to be a serious concern.
Small businesses aren't the only ones sweating cloud computing's shortcomings. Although start-ups are often the hardest hit by outages, even the venerable New York Times, which uses S3 to store and deliver articles from its historical database, was down for the count when Amazon Web Services suffered a two-hour outage in February 2008.
Source: Computerworld