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.