Before you dive head first into the cloud, betting the farm on cloud-based services and filling your pockets with certs, remember that for the newly minted "Everything as a Service," or XaaS, to succeed, the Internet must be perceived as a rock-solid platform and its data storage must be contained in a rock-solid state. Today it is, but there are some cracks to consider.

• The online storage provider Evernote announced that data on 7,000 users had been lost due to a system failure.
• Online merchant services provider Quicken, was down for days twice this summer, leaving online merchants stranded.
• This month a California judge sentenced a disgruntled network administer to four years in prison because he refused to reveal network passwords to the municipality for which he worked.
• Black Hats are trying to take down the Net.

It goes without saying that the cloud has to extend right to my endpoint. So if my ISP has a hiccup, I'm bumped off of Google Docs no matter how stable the rest of the Net. I'm surprised that Quicken's failures didn't get more play in the news. These transactions were performed in the cloud. It was as if someone went into a brick and mortar store and removed a cash register for two days, but the doors had to remain open. It was out of the proprietor's hands. Locally, I can create a separate network password that gives me all the rights my Network Administrator holds.  I'll never get that from the cloud. I'm not saying XaaS isn't coming, but terra firma computing may have a lot more life left, especially if we have an extended Internet outage. CEOs have big concerns about the safety and accessibility of their data, and if a big enough problem makes the headlines, it will postpone the revolution. But who knows, the problem of an unstable network may create jobs for specialists in bullet-proofing redundancy. -- Dino Londis