by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
Another reason to use the cloud: a lower carbon footprint
[Via Ars Technica]
To the standard reasons to move to the cloud—greater scalability, reduced administrative costs, improved availability—Microsoft is hoping to add another reason: a lower carbon footprint. A new, Microsoft-sponsored study suggests that small businesses can reduce their carbon footprint by up to 90 percent by switching from on-premises Exchange, Sharepoint, and Dynamics CRM to cloud-hosted alternatives.
The argument makes sense; small businesses tend to have servers with capacities greatly in excess of their needs, leading to a lot of waste—an idle server may use 50-60 percent of the power of a fully-laden one. Cloud service providers use multi-tenancy to ensure that their servers run with little spare capacity, getting far more useful work out of each ton of carbon dioxide. Their specialization also allows them to build data centers with higher efficiency than conventional standalone servers.
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The thing businesses will need to get over is putting their hard earned data onto someone else’s servers. Trust will have to be earned as well as an excellent uptime record.
All it will take is one massive period of downtime or someone accessing data they should not and all the good from the cloud will be gone.
A Man With A Ph.D. 
Not to mention that there is no reason to trust any of the “people” in the cloud. For that matter, a “cloud” is a misty, water-laden, fog;not very good for data.