We quite often cover the many benefits and cost savings that cloud computing can bring to your small business. We also like to examine both sides of case as to avoid bias and we will now examine some of the negatives associated with cloud storage. First there are the costs. Sure cloud computing can save you money but depending on your firm’s size and storage needs the differences between using an outside source and doing your own hosting can shrink. Next, the speed of downloading and definitely uploading is often much slower than compared to in house run systems. There are several other negatives but the most obvious and important one is privacy and security. You have to realize that you are likely placing your small business’s propriety intellectual property and other sensitive material on someone else’s server. Despite what they say you will always have the feeling in the back of your head that they could access your material. Also with the daily news of hackers attacking sites, e.g. GoDaddy, vulnerabilities become more apparent. Even if the intent of the hacker is to not steal your information an attack could wipe clean everything which would defeat the purpose of using a cloud as a backup service in the first place. SmallBiz Technology continues with more on this issue, “there’s an ongoing debate about whether you should really back stuff up on the cloud or put them into concrete on-premise backups. While some might err on the side of the cloud, there’s no “all-around” argument that supports the need to move onto the cloud in all situations. Here are some situations in which you might want to keep backing up your systems on-site:

• If you have a lot to back up, such as entire system hierarchies and volumes containing terabytes of data, you’d probably be making a foolish move by relying on the cloud. The process of backing up online isn’t problematic. The problem exists when you recover these files. Slower network speeds might cause backups to come back a day or more. It’s just not productive at all.
• On-premise backups are right there next to you and testable on the spot. If you need a rigorous backup solution you’re sure no one can tap into, you’re set with a few extra hard drives to store all that data.
• If you run heavy-duty servers, on-premise backups make virtualization very plausible, ensuring that data disasters remain very short-lived and your customers remain minimally affected…”

Click on the link below to see the rest of the author’s reasoning.