Recovering in the Cloud

Ive been a bit behind in posting over the last few days, the reason is that last Thursday my laptop completely crashed (the dreaded Blue screen of death), all attempts at recovery failed, and the end result was a new machine.  Fortunately, most of my data and applications reside in the cloud, the latest buzz-word for application service providers, or software-as-a-service.  With the cloud, all applications and data reside somewhere on the Internet rather than locally on ones own machine.

Within an hour of receiving my new machine I was pretty much back up and running with most of my applications, including IM, mail/calendar, newsfeeds, and blogging tools.  But still, I wonder if folks relying on the cloud are ignoring the concerns we discovered last year.  Folks have come to expect the Internet to always work at a high level, but then again, we also came to expect reasonable prices for gas.