Agreed BUT in some atmospheres it might be worth the trade off. The thing about local encryption is that TRUST is maintained locally. In ANY other scenario you are absolutely sending trust along with your data. A simplistic example is the movie star fappening thread running around here. Much easier to send the pics and data to their cloud, which they all trusted was secure, but it wasn't! So the definition of "too expensive" with time might be debatable if you talked to those folks. When I ran my own corporation I couldn't afford the "time" cost either. However; to retain the TRUST locally I simply purchased large externals (raid,etc...) and rotated them. We are talking < 10 TB though. For many companies the volume is way beyond where we were. I feel your concerns about TIME, but I present the other concern TRUST. Its a trade off.
Correct, trust was my original concern. I don't have any. If the cloud is your only option, encryption is a must regardless of how long it takes. Unencrypted in the cloud is unacceptable.
Cloud is not only used as storage. There are Web services like Google Docs. They would not work with encrypted documents. Cloud is also hosting platform for applications deployed by users on it. Until homomorphic encryption is going to be mastered, it is rather choice between use or not use cloud.
