Cloud computing enthusiasts be warned. Next year, computing services handled remotely and delivered via the internet may undergo some kind of "catastrophe" that alerts companies and consumers to the risks of relying on the so-called cloud, says Mark Anderson, chief executive of Strategic News Service, an industry newsletter circulated to senior executives at technology companies, including Intel, Dell and Microsoft.

A growing number of businesses and individuals are handing storage and various other tasks to outside providers, from photographers archiving pictures with Yahoo!'s Flickr to companies turning over complicated computing operations to Amazon. Tech prognosticator Anderson suggests that the tendency could backfire in some high-profile way in the coming year. "It could either be a service-outage-type catastrophe or a security-based catastrophe," he says. "In either case, it will be big enough. It will be the kind of disaster that makes you say, if you're a [chief information officer]: 'That's why I didn't get involved with the cloud.'"

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