As the Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage markets continue to mature, some of those vendors are going to go out of business. It is the natural order of things. The strong (or well funded) survive. You either need to be very sure that the cloud vendor is not going to be one of those that does or you need to make sure you are getting your data out of the cloud on a regular basis.

Predicting those that are not going to fail could be a tall task. Impressive facilities and row after row of storage and servers are not really a great indicator. The only real gauge should be how long have they been in the business of storing or processing external customer information. With few exceptions anything more than a few years of experience is all you are going to find. That means you need to take further steps.

Failure of the organization is not the only reason to get your data out of the cloud. What if the cloud provider’s data protection practices are weak and they loose data that can’t be recovered? Sure you can take legal action but if your data is gone, its gone. What if your business relationship sours, or you suddenly can’t afford to use the service. Your organization may also be purchased by an organization that is not using the same cloud services as you or may not use cloud services at all. You may very quickly need to roll out the service internally or move to another service.

more of the Information Week article from George Crump