8. Outages are occurring too often. Up to 365 million users of Microsoft Corp.'s e-mail and cloud services worldwide were scratching their heads at the end of the week: Hotmail, Skydrive, Office 365, and others Windows Live service were inaccessible. Though service was restored in a couple of hours for most, the downtime was the second in 30 days.

7. Rivals don't have anything more reliable. Just a day before Microsoft sent these useless 'I'm sorry' notes -- "We're aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them. We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience." -- Google Inc.'s Google cloud apps, including Google Docs, encountered a 30-minute outage, which was not also the first time for the search giant. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud platform had outages and lost customer data in April and August.

6. Offline storage is still preferred by many. Despite the hassles and costs of managing data locally and accessing data remotely -- e.g. needing a flash drive or an external device or sending an e-mail before being able to work on another device or location -- many firms still hasn't been sold to cloud computing.

5. Network connectivity is still not 24/7. We have Wi-Fi in most places, smartphones now using 4G LTE, but there are times when network issues -- poor or no connectivity -- still exist, making people wary about relying solely on the cloud for data and apps. Although Google recently added some limited offline functionality, editing and storing content when there's no network connection remains a problem, according to Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek.

4. Chromebooks are not selling. Sales of the Chromebook, a mobile device running Google Inc.'s Chrome OS, began in June, but do you know anybody with a Chromebook? The Chromebook offers amazing features that include only 8 seconds of boot time, and a multi-layer architecture that makes anti-virus software necessary. But the Chromebook is primarily designed to be used while connected to the Internet and the core of each Chromebook is the Chrome web browser. But you can't run a browser offline, could you?

3. Security breaches are everywhere. News about hack attacks or online security breaches doesn't entice enterprises into storing valuable documents at some cloud server. Netherlands-based DigiNotar, which issues certificates that validate Web sites, recently disclosed that it had been hacked, and, in effect, compromised Google accounts of more than 300,000 Iranians.If you don't care about Iranians, note that Citigroup Inc. (its 210,000 credit card customers in the U.S.), Sony Corp. (its PlayStation network users), entities affiliated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.S. government (confidential cables lost to Wikileaks), among other large institutions, have been victims of cyber attacks this year. Aside from hackers, the cloud vendor, and others can easily have access to proprietary or sensitive information stored in the cloud.

2. Cloud users still archiving data locally. Microsoft says that more than 20 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 use Microsoft's cloud productivity tools. But how many of these cloud users have gotten rid of their own data centers to solely rely on these cloud services? Some Office 365 users, for example, still archive their e-mails in their own hard drives in fear that the cloud vendors would lose their data. There are more than 4 million businesses using Google Apps, but it is likely that some of these are still storing data in-house.

1. Apple is still about to release the iCloud. What some people love (or hate) about Apple is that it waits for the technology or innovation to be there, add lipstick or some aesthetics then come up with something that consumers love. As a corollary to that proof, Samsung, accused by Apple of imitating the unique features of Apple devices, hasn't launched its own cloud service as well. Seriously, announced by Steve Jobs at a developers' conference in June, iCloud, according to analysts, will raise Apple from being a $400 billion company to a $500 billion company. The service -- which would allow users to store data such as music files and documents on remote computer servers for download or access via multiple Apple devices -- is still with developers. As Apple is still in version one of iCloud and other cloud experts Microsoft, Amazon and Google still encountering bugs and a number of issues, cloud computing certainly is still in its infancy.

For an interesting article on Google and Android, READ Google and Android PCs, Not A Question of "If" but "When"

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