Governing has a great article about governments using the cloud and takes a good look at how Scott County, MN, utilizes the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud.  The benefits?

And the fact that Amazon is such a trusted name helped too. When county officials and IT folks discussed the deal with a few Lawson reps, Ellsworth says the risk of using Amazon as a provider came up “and was dismissed very quickly, simply because of the name and that’s their business — and their business lives and dies by their own internal security.”

Should a disaster happen, the county would now recover its data and applications from the Amazon cloud. The cloud updates itself every hour, so minimal information should be lost if something unfortunate happens.

Is your organization utilizing the cloud in any way?