If ever there was a city that should have embraced cloud services, it would be New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, network administrators could see first hand the vulnerability of locally stored data. In the Civil District Court clerk's office, the city is losing billions of dollars of transactions because of a hard drive failure. The problem has prevented online checks for liens, judgments, and lawsuits. City Councelwoman Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson, who's also a Realtor, says, "We're scared to death until we get this fixed." Right now all searches are being done manually by poring over books. [NPR]

-- Dino Londis