[tomx]

"This thinking is backwards. If you care about the reliability, security, and the protection of your data, then you should entrust it to those who are most capable of managing it. If you believe you can match the capabilities and rigor of Google’s Security Operations team, I wish you well."

They may be good, but naturally introduces more attack vectors into many applications.

My nicely firewalled and audited application would become exposed to an undetermined number of people I have never met. e.g. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369188,00.asp . It only takes one rogue person and you have a problem.

My application has 5 trusted people. It would be interesting to know the additional number of people you are implicitly trusting by using a cloud service. 100?

[shuzchen]

Unless you also run and operate your own datacenter, the number of people you implicitly trust is fewer but still roughly the same as with a cloud provider. There's all the datacenter security personal, network and hardware technicians that could all possibly be "rogue".