There are other risks too. Could your data be permanently lost due to a system failure or a malicious insider at your cloud service provider? Could a denial-of-service attack against your cloud service provider render your data inaccessible for an extended period of time? As with any system, security often comes at the expense of convenience. As a business leader, you must consider if the benefits of cloud-based services outweigh the potential risks, which in some cases may turn into real loss.

Have you chosen to store any of your personal data in the cloud? If so, do you store all of your data or only certain types of data? If not, what factors have inhibited you from putting your data in the hands of a cloud provider? If you don't use cloud-based storage, how do you back up your data?

This article discussed the specific example of a petroleum company using cloud-based data analytics to improve decision making. What other industries can you identify that would benefit from the ability to capture large quantities of data in real time, analyze the data, and then use the results of those analyses to make better decision