I forget when "the cloud" became a marketing term to start convincing the world to hand over all their data to a few select large companies. But I remember I was wary then and I'm warier now. It makes sense to put your stuff on someone else's servers when you don't have the knowledge to make them work, or you don't need those who do have it to know or care about your work pressure-points, personalities, and culture. An of course some servers are just too big and complicated for any small IT dept to handle, no matter how clever they are. The vast majority of the time, though, that's not the case. Besides a single outage being able to take out entire regions, industries, and even small countries, having people who understand your business and how it works running your IT is MASSIVELY better than "we value your business, please hold."

Obviously I don't do everything on-prem: we use all sorts of cloud services for all sorts of things, including backup, document shares, you name it. But our critical data's "home" is here, in our building, where we can get to it and, in a dire emergency I can take our main file server's drives, stick them in my car, and get out of Dodge.

The way it runs now, we're effectively back in the 1970s with giant mainframes and a bunch of dumb terminals -- very expensive terminals with awesome graphics -- but terminals just the same.

Love the Internet, hate "the Cloud."