Mint: Intuit Strategy Becoming Clearer

The short answer is that YOU can't determine the level of safety. The only way that some large corporate can do that is with an end-to-end audit. The problem is that there is a food chain going on here, and you have no real visibility into where your data is ultimately being stored, including several continents away. And, you don't know about the trustworthiness of the employees. When you send your data into the cloud, all you can do is "hope" that your data is safe. And more than once, I've heard someone way that, "Hope is not a plan, or a course or action."

However, it all comes down to your willingness to take on some measure of risk in exchange for the benefits of cloud storage, or cloud-based applications. And the problem is that you don't know what you don't know, the unknown unknowns, as someone once said.