It was only a matter of time, same as the stories that began emerging about SaaS.
Perhaps the greatest fears of the all-encompassing latest trend known as Cloud Computing is who owns your data, who actually has your data, and is your data safe & reliable?
The question really is, is the cloud meant for data storage, or is it a solution for highly-scalable on-demand distributed computing? I vote for the latter.
Customers at The Linkup (formely MediaMax) just found this out the hard way. On August 8th The Linkup apparently shutdown after losing almost half of their customer’s data. The data is gone, never to return. This article from NetworkWorld mentions that the Industry Standard indicates The Linkup had 20,000 customers. Due to a company split data migration/integration was necessary. When the migration went seriously wrong, they shut the doors.