[cviedmai]

I never quite understood why everybody thinks storage should be in the local server and cannot be provided by a private company.

IMHO, storage is a commodity.

Would you argue that schools need their own power generators because otherwise they'll be submitted to private companies? Should schools also have their own satellites and internet connections?

If the data is sensitive why not just encrypting it when is stored the same way we do when we need to transmit something over the wire?

Now, from the school POV I think if they go for a private solution they should demand open standards (avoid being locked in) and appropriate SLAs.

[dkarapetyan]

Because if all the computation is still happening on the remote server then that remote server has access to whatever encryption key was used. That defeats the whole purpose of what you're suggesting. Which means you have to shuttle the encrypted data to some private server, decrypt it, and then operate on it which means you might as well just host it locally. The only way this works is if we get practical homomorphic encryption at which point storage truly becomes a commodity and that's when Google loses all interest in hosting that data.