I would like to clarify that the word “cloud” is not a verb and this trend needs to stop.  If you ask me “cloud that data” or “cloud it up”, I may junk punch you.  In fact, the term “cloud” is really over used and over simplified in general.   There is a huge place for cloud computing, but I would like us to stop pretending that “the cloud” is this all encompassing do-everything widget in the sky that solves the world’s problems.

When businesses decide that they need to move to the cloud, I hope they understand that things CAN and will go wrong… even in the cloud.  If you don’t believe me, ask the folks who used Amazon Cloud services, such as www.reddit.com who experienced an outage of several days.  Reddit was far from the only business impacted, but it was the one I was most directly impacted by.

I see salespeople tout cloud capabilities as this almost foolproof solution that will solve all of your problems.  While I believe that there are many things that can be done in the cloud, there will always be problems.  Just because you are storing your data “in the cloud”, does not mean that there is not a possibility of a downtime.  Just because an app is available for your cloud computing solution de jour, it does not mean that the app is as awesome as a locally stored counterpart.

We are going to see more vulnerability over the next few years of the cloud, but it does not mean that it is going away.  Storing information and functionality in the cloud will continue to grow and this is the future.  When you are looking at utilizing the cloud solutions out there, please keep your bearings and realize that it will not solve all of your problems… like any application.  It will probably even add a few problems.

So, keep on moving forward with your technology at a reasonable pace, but please understand that there is work to do to keep and maintain cloud applications.  And for pete’s sake, don’t be a douche and use cloud as a verb.