Sure, a cloud provider can go bust. But online providers usually give you ample warning to get your data off their service if that kind of thing happens. And, try as I might, I really can't see a company like Google going under anytime soon.

How about looking at cloud computing from a programmer's point of view? For a programmer, cloud computing offers something that's been desired for years--the ability to create . If you manage to make your app work in Firefox and Chrome running on Windows, then in all likelihood, it will work well on Mac and Linux computers too. Mobile computing devices , or at least contemporary devices that have the power to run such apps.

Even if a few tweaks are necessary, they'll be nothing like the complexity of recoding applications for every different platform.

How about looking at the cloud from a worker's point of view? The biggest boon here is that if a file is stored in the cloud, it will always be available. In other words, if you need that updated spreadsheet from John, there's no need to nag him to send it to you by e-mail. You can just grab the file from the cloud, even if he's still working on it. In suites like Google Docs, you could even open the file, open the chat component, .

IT managers complain about cloud security issues, but what about the security benefits? For starters, cloud computing means there's only ever a central, single version of each file. There will never be or USB memory sticks, or just about anywhere somebody needed to edit it (maybe even--horror!--on Internet café computers).