Bill,
re: "I would assume that anyone doing business would protect his web links. And not use on-line storage for critical material."
You've brought up a highly topical issue here. What you have stated could apply equally not only to end user organizations and to Web-based businesses, but to application service providers and other forms of "service providers", themselves.
Whether any business can adequately protect their links offline, which is what I've taken your comment to mean, or be forced to use online storage, boils down to basic economics of scale. Although, I'll grant you that other factors, most of which involve enterprises' use of service level agreements, where compliance to statutes aren't also involved, also come into play, as well.
[However, and this is a late afterthought, I don't believe that the law has kept pace with technology in this respect, but I'd have to check further on this. For example, are there restrictions placed on banks, who are seen as the custodians of public funds, on the use of public storage facilities in lieu of their own? Hospitals, who are the custodians of the public's health records? Other sensitive areas? And where does one draw the line between a publicly accessible storage facility and one that is consortium based, when both of them use the same technologies, and probably the same data centers, as well? New York's top banks and brokerages, for example, own storage farms in the city's largest collocation centers, where every popular Web service under the sun also draws from the same electric grid, uses the same air conditioning systems, and pumps bits onto the same fiber optic backbones.]
Using online storage, as opposed to customer-owned storage, has become as commonplace today -- and at the same time dependent on the same constraints, as using the Internet for communicating with one another and to the world, in lieu of the switched public telephone network, which has proved inadequate, and private lines that were once used, which are now considered prohibitively expensive for achieving like functions.
Those who are exceptions to these rules will, over time, pay ever costlier premiums for their security, which could be offset only by the largest entities whose economies of scale rival those of large hosting sites and the likes of Google's and Amazon's Web-based services.
A case in point: The Amazon Web Service EC2 compute cloud complex is being viewed today by some startup service providers as their main infrastructures. Thus far it's been used primarily by Web startups, and as a computing grid by not-for-profits and some enterprise development teams on non-mission-critical applications. IMO, it wouldn't take very much arm-twisting to push it over the top, i.e., to a point where individuals and enterprises find it a viable approach to production storage and computing, as well.
Some "success stories" based on Amazon's S3 and EC2 services:
amazon.com
FAC
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