That’s the rationale provided by Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, during a panel discussion on cloud computing during a keynote address at . Also on the panel were Randy Rowland, senior vice president of product development at Terremark; Andy Schroepfer, vice president of enterprise strategy at Rackspace; and moderator David Berlind, chief content officer at UBM TechWeb.

Berlind began the discussion be reviewing the recent cloud outages and attacks at Amazon – up to three days for some users – and the , which lasted several days and affected 100 million customers. Berlind also quoted data that found that every one second of latency costs financial trading firms $100 million over a year.

“Is this mission critical?” Berlind asked of the cloud infrastructure in light of these outages. “This is a confidence issue.”

“It’s like an airline crash,” responded Citrix’s Crosby, “but it’s still safer in an airplane than driving to work.”

Crosby then wondered aloud what the cloud or IT equivalent is of the Federal Aviation Administration, the airline industry’s regulator and watchdog.  Without waiting for an answer, he continued with his analogy. “Broadly, you’re far better off in the cloud than doing things your own way,” he said.