It has to be confessed that many cloud applications today lack
some of the functionality of their traditional counterparts (at the same
time, the ubiquitous nature of the cloud allows the cloud applications
to have some unique characteristics that are not readily available in
their traditional counterparts). As a result, some applications might
not be currently suitable for transition to a cloud but might
nevertheless need to interact with other cloud-based applications:
managing these interactions will pose a technological and contractual
challenge for organizations. Many organizations will be understandably
wary of the lack of control over the information or the
infrastructure,5 or of the possibility of vendor lock-in in the absence
of standards. Cloud applications do not yet have the availability or
quality-of-service guarantees that some organizations demand (perhaps
sometimes unreasonably) from their IT vendors. Like any other
service that depends on centrally located data, cloud services are
subject to outages or even data loss that could result from reasons as
varied as hardware and/or software failure to acts of nature or
terrorist attacks. The recent outages of Google's GMail service or
Microsoft's Danger division's loss of some of the data of T-Mobile's
mobile customers have provided fodder to critics of cloud computing
who believe that cloud computing is inherently unreliable. Other
weaknesses include limitations of bandwidth for certain dataintensive
applications, and the problem with short-lived virtual
computers in carrying out IT forensics.