Already, trust issues dominate concerns about cloud computing. “The overriding feature of the cloud is that it breaks down barriers and boundaries,” says Phil Wainewright, industry analyst with Procullux Ventures, Community Manager for Leveraging the Connected Web at ebizQ, and ZDNet blogger. “When that trusted perimeter fencing comes down and it’s no longer there, people rightly feel exposed to the unfamiliar. Now for developers, what that means is they have to be aware, we’re often taken for parameters that in a conventional behind the firewall environment you simply would have taken for granted but which you can’t in the cloud environment.”
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/soainaction/2009/08/cloud_need_not_be_a_venture_in.php
One of the things that holds back companies and developers from engaging with cloud resources is simply the fact that the cloud represents the unknown. However, once you get past that, there’s another pressing issue that companies moving into the cloud face — getting the various off-site applications to communicate and pass data between one another