Surely, common sense dictates, it’s safer to keep your servers, applications and data securely on your own premises? Not necessarily. In fact, some proponents of the cloud argue that buying services rather than servers can be more secure.

Let’s take physical security first: how vulnerable is your infrastructure to floods, fires, theft and catastrophic hardware failures? Unless you’re in the top echelon of South African corporates and running your own data centre, the answer may be scary.