I argue frequently that the cloud causes cognitive dissonance. People want the ease of use and reliability of centralized outsourced services, but other people want data privacy guarantee and control of those services. If anything is a threat to one or the other, it&#x27;s the fact we fail to understand the various requirements from distinctly different use cases.<p>These polarized &quot;requirements&quot; are usually rationalized away by each group. As a data privacy advocate, I believe that I can provide a reliable storage solution to my company without using a centralized cloud service, which then guarantees my privacy because &quot;I&#x27;m in control&quot;. As an advocate of centralized cloud services, such as Amazon, I present that their team is better at security and reliability than any other team on the planet and that I can encrypt something and trust that my key management is secure. Both of these arguments have fallacies and assumptions.<p>The solution is to challenge ourselves to build better solutions. At what point in time did technology advancement ever slow down? At what point will we ever stop and say &quot;Y&#x27;all, this here compute system is <i>good enough</i> and should be centralized&#x2F;decentralized!&quot;? Never, I say.