You shouldn't. The cloud is just someone else's computer. You can mitigate things by encrypting a lot but there's no way you can't know they don't peek at your data.

So if you can't trust the company offering the service, you shouldn't do business with them. It's the same with food and food supplies: if they can't be trusted to serve/sell you stuff that doesn't make you ill, don't do business with them. Very simple.

Of course, I completely agree. But it is like you say, you either trust the provider or you don't (ceteris paribus encryption issues).

I don't and never have done for personal use.

I literally have an IMAP box and nothing else.

I assume from your answer, that you do use it for professional purposes?

Yes but not on recommendation. In fact the majority of what I do these days is legislative compliance and bringing teams and applications back onshore that the companies have fucked up.

Currently digging a financial company out of a royal mess of 20 years of bad technical leadership leading to sprawling infrastructure and cloud dependencies.

Oh wow. This is a tough task.

In your experience, what are the "worst" cloud dependencies? I'd imagine SalesForce and AWS would have very different impact?

Money is good though so that's some consolation :)

Salesforce is the root of all evil. Once you're in the ecosystem, you're stuffed. You know it's bad when the entire business team start running round clucking when the EMEA salesforce instance goes down hard...

AWS is fine. Most of the platform's concepts have real world parallels for example.