"this was not an assault on cloud computing." Meanwhile, the founder of cloud vendor Elastic Vapor, , asserted that "the Google Hack proves the cloud is more secure than traditional desktop software, not less," apparently because systems were "compromised through phishing scams or malware, not through holes in Google's computing infrastructure."

Others disputed this idea, such as Search Engine Land editor , who wondered if the security breach "will develop into a major reversal for the growth of cloud computing."

Pund-IT analyst Charles King cautioned that we still don't know all the details of the breach, but said it should raise concerns about the security of cloud computing services. All IT systems, whether in the cloud or not, have some inherent flaws, but "any time a data center is open to the public Internet, there is the opportunity that it can be hacked in a number of ways," he says.

"Every system has some inherent flaw or weakness. People do break into supposedly impregnable bank vaults, tunnel through walls," King says. "No house is burglar proof and the same can be said of data centers. The bottom line here for me is some of the people who have been promoting cloud as … the future of IT have really been overstating the case. I think we will continue to see events like Google and the failure over time."