Are there black clouds brewing over the hot cloud computing industry? Some seem to think so. Security and outage fears continue to hover as the black clouds over cloud computing, rendering some people and companies reluctant to move their data and apps to the cloud.

Just in the past week or two, there have been some some jolting reminders that cloud computing — in which users get their apps, storage and more from service providers via the Internet, or “cloud” — presents risks. In late April, Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services Web-hosting and storage cloud computing service had what some call the worst outage in cloud computing history. Big sites such as Foursquare, Quora and Reddit suffered major service disruptions. Around the same time, Sony (SNE) shut down its PlayStation Network and music-streaming service Qriocity after an attacker made off with passwords and personal data from 77 million customer accounts, and possibly 10 million encrypted credit card files.

As reported in today’s Investor Business Daily (investors.com), the executive chairman of EMC’s RSA security division, Art Coviello, told IBD in an interview that survey results show that people are reluctant to move to the cloud. “We have a tidal wave of information being created and more and more sensitive information being shared. This creates significant information governance challenges regarding where sensitive data moves, who gets it (and) how it’s protected at rest and in motion.”

In speaking with IBD, Coviello stopped short of calling the cloud unsafe. But he said RSA is “bringing solutions to market that take advantage of virtualization technology to provide better security in the cloud environment than exists today.” The Amazon and Sony incidents highlighted the need for better cloud security and backup planning and redundancy, teaching technical lessons that might come in handy next time.

Despite the recent negative PR related to the security and outage incidents, the stock prices of both AMZN and EMC are holding up relatively well, only slightly below recent highs. The price of Sony’s stock has been struggling for some time after selling off in early to mid-March and is currently mired well below its’ 200 day moving average, a sign of poor investor support and sentiment.