It doesn't take much reading of the literature to understand industrial espionage or any of the other substantive risks of outsourcing. Prism or not, when you put your intellectual property on someone else's networks you are taking a risk.

Yet most of the managers I see who make this decision just don't care. They ignore the advice of their systems admins and follow the old adage "you can't get fired for buying IBM" like sheep to a slaughter. It's typical of the short-term mindset that drives so many business decisions.

I chalk this up to a lack of education, both in business and IT. While CS professors obsess over data structures and algorithms, and non-IT departments preach about the relevance of the next quarter's results, "Rome is burning".