I published an opinion on the dangers of moving to the cloud from the perspective of reverse engineering. Will be nice to hear more voices about it.
The article is at http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-and-the-cloud/ ("http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-and-the-cloud/")

Cloud? What cloud? Clouds are good for delivering water on earth.

I'm an old man who still keeps his money under his pillow.

Apps & cloud? Hell no! Nobody can touch my apps the way I touch them.

I was always told one could go blind from touching their "apps" in that manner.

Regards,

The issue is that the industry is moving to the cloud, making it difficult to exercise RE there. Companies are following that track as lemmings.

The cloud has been moving in for quite a while.

I am not sure how many people are comfortable
having sensitive data that can be a target
for those who exploit such things.

Thats the way I see it. Then again, I keep my
money inside my mattress.
Nobody will ever look there.

Woodmann

Or even grow hair on one's palms. . .from touching "apps" in that manner, of course. :P

Have Phun

I haven't read your article yet, but this is my opinion. I am assuming you mean that all your tools (Virtual Machines) will be stored in the cloud? or are you saying the binaries you are analyzing will be in the cloud?. If it just your virtual machines, then I don't think it will matter much, maybe just in speed. However, if you are refering to the binaries, then I guess that would be interesting. Does anyone already have a cloud setup (and be serious guys!:rolleyes which they can give us some info on how different is from a physical host.

Although, from a computer forensics point of view, that will be a pickle.

I mean software by third parties. If it is your information you have full access. Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. You can depend on their software but never have an opportunity to analyze it.

I wrote about this topic in my blog.
There will come a time where everything will be cloud based, apps, services, operating systems (google-os) and more...
There will come a time that all tools we know
And love will be absolute...
You can choose to stay with a native OS for your daily basis in the future but than all other stuff will be not much avail...
Time to write new cloy based tools cloud based systems!