>Hm. Your idea that "cloud is actually pixie dust magically solving all problems" seems to fail your very own test. Is there a way to prevent the outsourced admins from, um, destroying something when they are actively hostile? Nope, you've only added a layer of indirection.

the idea here is to make sure that the people with write-access to production don't have write-access to the backups and vis-a-vis. The point is that now two people have to screw it up before I lose data.

Outsourcing has it's place. You are an idiot if you outsource production and backups to the same people, though. This is why I think "the cloud" is a bad way of thinking about it. Linode and rackspace are completely different companies... one of them screwing it up is not going to effect the other.