Is the Cloud Falling From the Sky?

An article on ZDnet outlined an incident that affects anyone who puts information up on the aforementioned “cloud”..
First of all what is a cloud?
Cloud computing describes computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Parallels to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid where end-users consume power resources without any necessary understanding of the component devices in the grid required to provide the service.
The blogosphere was buzzing Monday with news of Google’s Gmail outage. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan outlined backup options, while young Zack Whittaker could barely contain his glee that Microsoft wasn’t alone in hosing a major webmail product. And yet, despite the inconvenience, the sky simply isn’t falling. The cloud is alive and well and Gmail remains one heck of a safe place to store your email (and everything else for that matter).
The outage referred to an incident last week when Google lost 38,00 users email account information. Basically for these affected users, their Gmail homepage looked like it did the first day they singed up for the service. This called into question obvious concerns regarding the safety of the cloud as a storage hub for individuals information.
As Christopher Dawson explains, Every time something like this happens, cloud naysayers take the opportunity to tell us why it’s a bad idea to store valuable information out in this mythical, mystical cloud. Those naysayers are usually no fans of Google, since the web giant has so much riding on cloud strategies and would just love for all of us to join them in embracing the unseen, distributed web. It’s not like Google has a competing desktop product for what it does. The Chrome OS only solidifies the idea that computers need merely be portals to the web with anything of value stored and synced across Google’s servers.
Therefore we are all left with our fingers crossed, and are eyes turned up toward the Google gods, hoping that every time we punch in our UN’s and PW’s that we see our electronic correspondence safe and sound up on the cloud.