Weak points in major relational database systems in a Cloud Computing environment, in which the nodes were geographically distant, are identified. The study questions whether running databases in the Cloud provides operational disadvantages. Findings indicate that performance measures of RDBMS’ in a Cloud Computing environment are inconsistent and that a contributing factor to poor performance is the public or shared infrastructure on the Internet. Also, that RDBMS’ in a Cloud Computing environment become network-bound in addition to being I/O bound. The study concludes that Cloud Computing creates an environment that negatively impacts RDBMS performance for RDBMS’ that were designed for n-tier architecture.