I don’t know when or where I first heard the expression “cloud computing,” but I recall thinking it must be something revolutionary. Maybe a breakthrough in quantum computing?

Then it began turning up in conference workshops. Speakers talked about “being in the cloud,” as if there was no better place. No recruiting technology vendor’s demo was complete without a reference to how their SaaS product was “in the cloud.” No tech article was worth publishing without at least one reference to “the cloud.”

Chances are excellent you’ve used the term yourself, only sort of knowing what it means, divining an understanding from the multiple contexts in which you’ve heard or seen the term used.

Chances are excellent you got it sort of right. But in that “sort of” understanding of what cloud computing is lay all sorts of implications and potential complications that can scuttle all the good that cloud computing has to offer. And it does offer plenty of positives, which is why in recruiting, as in some other business areas, software vendors have been actively rebranding, if not entirely rewriting, their products to take advantage of the cloud.

All the cloud boosterism notwithstanding, is cloud computing something you and your company should consider?