What did people expect.
As usual, this is all about liabiltiy. Mistakes happen to everyone, whether a cloud provider or an end users IT department. However, the question is liability.
If you're doing your own IT and something goes wrong, it ultimately is your (as a company) fault. It might be you haven't employed the right people, trained them correctly, haven't got the right processes etc.etc. However, liability rests with you.
However, if you put it in the cloud or anywhere other than with you, liability rests with someone else. Do they employ the right people? Do they train them correctly? Have they got the right processes? You have no control over this and in an attempt to drive up profits, you can rest assured these will all drop in quality. And the liability is normally a few service credits when something goes wrong!!
So, anyone considering cloud should really understand that they are effectively giving up control of their systems and more importantly the risk factors around them. In return, the cloud company gives you a liability clause that pretty much negates all liability. They give you a rubbish service, you simply get a few months more of a rubbish service for free. Wonderful.
CEOs (and other decision makers) should really consider these decisions in the context of their own jobs. Why shouldn't we cloud the function of CEO? Simply feed the right information into someone elses 'cloud' and back comes a decision. If it proves to be wrong, you can get the next 3 decisions for free. It's the same thing. Do you think CEOs think that's a good idea? If it isn't, why is IT cloud a good idea, especially for mission critical systems?