Privacy and Security are two of the key concerns most of us have, when thinking about storing our mission critical data in the cloud. There are people who appreciate the benefits storing data in a cloud based data store such as SQL Azure. There are also people who warns about possible dangers in storing important data in a cloud store.

I recently wrote an introductory article to SQL Azure at sqlservercentral.com. You can read the article here. The discussion forum for this article saw a lot of very interesting arguments on the positive sides of cloud storage and the negative aspects of using a cloud store. You can follow the discussion thread here.

I just found two Microsoft White Papers that answers some of the questions that many of us have about the security and privacy of cloud data.

1. Privacy in the Cloud Computing Era
2. Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure

I have got a very interesting questions to the readers. Did reading these documents bring any changes to your thoughts about SQL Azure or cloud computing in general?

Please feel free to share your thoughts.