I’ve read numerous articles about cloud computing over recent months, some promoting the advantages and other questioning the benefits. A story in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye last week, which was headlined: “To Cloud, or Not to Cloud”.

The author of the piece provided some interesting takes around different areas that companies should consider as they make a decision on whether to move into the cloud. The story was balanced, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud.

Although many of the points in both the positive and negative columns were valid, I have a couple of key takeaways that further confirm to me that cloud is the way to go:

I recently wrote an article for Hedge Fund Journal and asked the question, “Does having your investor letter or risk report leaked to the media (a.k.a. headline risk) hurt your ability to compete with other firms for allocations or is it just embarrassing?”

I would say both. However, for a magazine like HFJ I needed to answer the question more scientifically. I found a survey of investors conducted by Deutsche Bank. The survey showed that investors did in fact believe headline risk was damaging to a fund’s reputation and a deterrent to investing. What was even more interesting is the survey found that investors, particularly institutional investors, felt headline risk was more of a turnoff than invoking a gate, side pockets or changing liquidity terms.

Earlier this year, we worked on an exciting project to significantly expand IntraLinks’ existing document protection feature. It goes beyond securing Adobe PDF documents to securing all types of Microsoft Office files both inside and outside the firewall. This kind of project, which allowed us to apply new technology to pressing business problems, was interesting to work on and was extremely useful to our clients – more than 15,000 of our users have protected their documents since this spring.

Our CEO, J. Andrew Damico recently had the opportunity to speak with editor Brandy Chetsas at Bankruptcy Professional, a fantastic newsletter for professionals involved in the bankruptcy process.