Cloud computing is a red-hot topic, but US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has shown it doesn’t always measure up for business use.

The Alaskan VP hopeful scored some unwanted headlines this week when someone managed to access a series of Yahoo mailboxes being used by her campaign team. Ouch – embarrassment all round.

Such cloud-based email offerings - provided by the likes of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft - are being increasingly used by people as part of their daily business lives.

Some small businesses nominate a Hotmail or Gmail address as their primary point of contact, removing the need to set up and manage their own system.

In larger organisations, employees often set up a re-direct rule within a corporate email infrastructure that sends copies of every message received to a nominated external account. This makes it easy to keep track of email without the hassle of logging in to the corporate system.

But, as Sarah Palin so ably demonstrated this past week, such convenience brings with it significant risks. Once your email is sitting in the cloud, it’s only a password away from being read by anyone with enough motivation to try. Gone is the protection afforded by corporate network security.

And with the rise of social networking, finding out someone’s password is easier than ever before. The answers to typical ‘secret’ questions (pet’s name, mother’s maiden name etc) are often lurking somewhere in online profiles or blogs for anyone to dig out.

There’s also the propensity for people to use the same password for multiple sites. Get hold of one and you’re likely to be able to prise open multiple facets of someone’s online life.

So what’s the lesson? If security is important to you, think twice before trusting free, hosted email systems for critical business communications. They might be convenient, but that convenience could come at a nasty price.