Haha… nice IJ reference.
The kicker for me with all these cloud services is when it is a large institution they can establish a contract and SLA that makes it clear what/when/how will be delivered. If those definitions are not met, there is room for grievance and negotiation (or arbitration).
If any of us single-users have a problem with a cloud service company, we do not have much sway and must hope their customer service team is capable, and permitted by their employer to assist and correct any problems. This of course assumes the company has deployed their infrastructure in such a way that meets the marketing promises and has policies that are not intentionally anti-customer.
For some reason the following anecdote comes to mind, though it may seem unrelated… Back in 2000 I was talking to a company about IT needs and they suddenly dumped a story on me about hiring a small tech firm to do their Y2K compliance checks. As 1999 began to wind up, they started asking for documents to show their insurance. Nothing happened and soon things escalated to the Y2K firm using their passwords to sabotage the company’s servers and data. Things got to the point where the FBI was brought in to investigate.
This story should leave anyone with a LOT of questions about the entire process, and while it is not about cloud services per se, it does lean into the subject of trust between two parties where technology is the connective tissue.