Some people don't want to be responsible for maintaining the actual hardware, being on-call to reboot something, or other administrivia.

I move everything I can to the cloud because I'm tired of coming in to work at 2AM to reboot something or wait for Verizon to repair a T1 line. I'm not afraid of Amazon AWS looking at our data. It's simply unlikely that it happens. And, if it does, what are they going to do with it? Shop it around to our competition? That scenario is just too silly to imagine compared to the benefits of cloud computing.

For us, the main benefits are the ability to cut-back on the data pipe(s) coming into this building. We run on what's basically consumer-grade cable service for $80 per month now. Previously, our phone (T1) and data costs were about $1300 per month and I had to do all the grunt work. Now we pay less than 1/4 that price, have more flexibility, and I don't have to deal with nearly as much bullshit.

As for hosting data and other stuff in the cloud, I'm all for it. I have been trying to justify moving everything to AWS or Azure for the past few months. Put thin clients on the desks here, give people 4G-connected tablets, and host everyone's desktop in the cloud. Unfortunately, the amount of data we would run through would be too costly at this time. If it weren't for the price issue, the physical servers we have now would all be gone.

But, cloud computing is a personal choice. You certainly don't have to embrace it if you don't want. It's a tool like anything else. You can leverage its power as much or as little as you're comfortable with.