The hacking of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account is a reminder of the vulnerability of Web-based mail -- and that's a cause for concern, or at least heightened vigilance, whatever side of the political spectrum you mail from.The report that Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo Mail account had been hacked, with some messages copied and appearing online is almost undoubtedly going to shift to coverage (biased or not, depending on your perspective) of the content of those stolen mails.

While that's going on, though, anyone who uses a Web-based mail service -- especially if you or any of your employees use it for business should -- should immediately take a look at your passwords, changing and strengthening them, and give some serious thought to just how much of your, and potentially your customers', confidential information you want to commit to a presence in the cloud.

Plenty of small and midsize businesses are migrating mail and plenty of other apps and tools cloudward and for good reason -- tools in the cloud are cheap (or free) as well as increasingly reliable and growing more powerful by the day. More power to them -- and to their effects as leveling agents for human-sized businesses going up against bigbiz behemoths.

But these tools and programs are also out there -- beyond your firewalls and network security, and that means you have to be even more careful than you are (or should be) within your own walls.

So take a look at your cloudmail and other cloud practices and procedures, strengthen your passwords, tighten up your act. Odds are your businesses isn't anywhere near as high-profile hacker bait as Governor Palin.

But that doesn't mean you won't be targeted.

For you and your webmailing employees a must-read bMighty look at creating strong passwords is here.