Originally posted by cdw2000 C.L.O.U.D = Customer Loses Own Use of Data
That’s conflating SaaS with cloud. A cloud platform underlies the Amazon SaaS service. The service offering could change and that doesn’t care about the platform. If they were just a bunch of physical servers the situation with respect to service longevity would likely be worse certainly no better.
The fact that it’s a value added service tacked onto prime and not free makes it more likely to stick around but proving and limits could shift. I’d personally bet files on Amazon are safer than files on a home nas. But only a little. As stated earlier by another person; multiple copies with some stored offsite are your best protection.
---------- Post added 09-22-22 at 05:51 PM ----------
In fact the Flickr transition post acquisition by smugmug was a prime example of cloud economics - the old deployment model wasn’t cloud based and cost an ever increasing amount to maintain. The shift to cloud plus the reduction of the unpaid file burden made the service viable. I think they handled the shift pretty gracefully.