Because money?

The price differential between buying the hw/sw & staffing a professional (or team of professionals) to curate and maintain it 24/7/365, or simply off-loading it all to an outside party, could be huge -- I'd dare say huge enough to make or break a company. From an executive POV, why care about data safety, when hosting it yourself makes your business model non-viable?

I realize there are lots of problems with this line of thinking, and I'm not advocating it at all, but I'm willing to bet this has been the case for some.

The vast majority of data, business as well as personal, does not require this level of security. For the remaining 1%, these sorts of measures are worth it.t

Exactly, the more efficient solution is having a government you can trust.

For some values of "efficient".

Building a government you can trust will take several generations, with each generation providing hundreds of thousands ENTIRE LIVES to the cause. It might be efficient in the grand scheme of things, but from an individual or even corporative point of view, it's terribly inefficient in any timeframe you might consider.

Well, and one the Germans can trust too, unless the Internet is artificially split back up across political boundaries :P

One of the local bike shop owners has 18 shops in two states and does well over $3 million dollars in revenue every year.

They use custom Apple/Mac software for all their POS equipment. You know how many people run an IT department that is charge of that much equipment, people, inventory and software?

TWO.

Less than fifty seats with two resources?

Scale that up to five thousand seats. Five thousand seats is big? Not really.

Every day a piece of hardware dies. Every month someone rolls out a new software package. There are many different user profiles, accounting, sales, warehouse, IT, marketing, executive. Then there's that one guy that needs that program that only runs on XP SP1....

Every IT department has to justify its cost per user. Once you get above 1K seats, a lot of things that seem like overkill start to make sense really quickly.

All Amazon is offering is a managed version of what larger companies have been doing internally for years. Just like their server business, it seems expensive until you actually work out how much it would cost to do it yourself.

Just because two can, doesn't mean two can do it well. It takes just one curious or nefarious person to crack the veil. Bike shops just aren't highly visible or obvious targets when weighed against other potential marks.

It's also another example of economies of scale working even if only on a smaller scale than a cloud. The guy has 18 bike shops. That's quite a few. If you have 18 bike shops I really would hope that you'd have somebody running IT for you. Still, it takes 18 bike stores and revenue north of 3 million dollars to power two IT guys. The cloud makes sense for folks that operate on a smaller scale than that, or just don't have access to those resources wherever they're doing their jobs.

Quite right, people do the best they can with what they have available. The promise of the cloud raising the bar on what smaller operations can deploy both in terms of sophistication and scalability vs price to play is certainly a strong factor in it's appeal.

Your nebulous black box is also not a safe place if someone really wants to get it.

Couldn't agree more. Something you control is only safer if you do a better job at controlling it than the other service would control it for you.

Why do you store your money with an external organisation that you don't control?

Because they offer better security than I can build in to my own home (at least not without significant effort) and they offer guarantees should my money go missing under many (but not all) circumstances (for example, the savings guarantee if a UK bank goes bust).

Do cloud providers offer the same? The guarantees may vary dependent upon service contracts (uptime, backups etc), but the idea that their data-centre was better secured than my company server-room was supposedly a given (at least for most small to medium organisations).

EDIT: added qualification to last sentence

Money is fungible. What is the equivalent of deposit insurance on my deepest, darkest secrets? This does not seem like a good analogy.

It's the same trade-off though - how much security can I provide versus how much security can they provide?

The insurance is just an incentive to keep my stuff safe (and in the case of savings guarantees, an incentive to keep consumer-facing banks from going bust).

> your deepest secrets inside of a nebulous black box that you don't control

If you have a secret, why would you even store on the Internet? If you are worrying about conversations with your friends, that kind of privacy, don't log it. If you can't trust Google/Skype, you have to find your own solution.

For me, I got a lot of cat photos and I don't know what NSA could do with my cat photos.

I think most f us are using deposit services for most valuable items & data. It's certainly safer than elcheapo safe at home.

Uh, banks made a whole business out of this in real life.