Cloud and Small Biz.

The Cloud offers a way for nearly anyone to have the technology tools that large enterprise businesses use at a fraction of the cost. Big businesses have taken advantage of these "free" to low cost technologies found online for years. When one looks at the numbers on it, their savings are huge over a workforce of 1000's. So, it is to the Cost advantage of a compact to mid-sized business owner to use when expanding and growing their business.

However, the downside of using the Cloud for the streamlined small businesses is potentially threating to their very existence. This threat is in how the data is distributed in the Cloud. The Cloud doesn't tell us where our highly refined data is stored for security purposes. And, the Cloud isn't mentioning if our data is stored in multiple countries such as Germany, Japan, China, Austrailia, etc. at the same time. So, our intellectual property is now falling under and in jurisdictions that smaller businesses do not have legal representation. In this Cloud, where the small business cannot see physically where things are, we are held at a disadvantage.

Aside: Another question I have is why isn't there a licensing body, that can find all the attributes of any document and allow "anyone" to register for a license to use the copyrighted materials? This is more like using something like "Limelight" for registering a mechanical license to record a song that someone else wrote. Maybe, in time something like this will be available and usable.