Cloud security guarantees?

Last week, Network World published an article on the type of security guarantees you can get from services in the cloud. Editor Tim Greene poses the question:

Cloud computing providers no doubt put forth a best effort to secure their infrastructure in order to protect their customers' data, but what kind of guarantees are there?

A widespread breach of customer data would cripple the reputation of a cloud provider and could set it up for legal action if the lost data had a financial impact on the customer or the customer’s customers.

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It seems unlikely that cloud providers are ever going to offer service-level agreements against data loss or successful exploits because the task is just too impossible and the potential liabilities would be too enormous to take on.

And that's probably the main issue. Most enterprises are going to want an SLA, or have a company that can be held accountable, if they use a cloud service and something goes wrong. So while cloud computing still has a lot of benefits to make it look attractive, there's still some serious issues that any enterprise is going to have to look at seriously before moving to a cloud model.