The article Forecast Mostly Sunny for Company Opting for Cloud Computing describes some of the common cloud computing benefits and potential drawbacks. One of the common drawbacks listed is that you are completely reliant on your cloud computing vendor (in this case Amazon). Near the end of the article, two comments from Stevie Clifton, Animoto’s CTO, match two that I’ve often thought when hearing the drawback about vendor reliance:

1. It’s no different than using any other web or application hosting as companies have done for some time.
2. At some point, you could use servers instances across more than one vendor’s cloud to limit your risk of reliance on one vendor.

Do you see using services in the cloud from being any different than utilizing other web/application hosting, server co-location or managed services in terms of reliance on other vendors?