This article by Dean Dickinson on www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk is a useful introduction on why it’s absolutely fine to be a bit unsure as to what cloud computing really is or really means.

Dickinson makes the point that providers are contributing to that confusion by coming up with lots of complex new terms and describes cloud computing as “a metaphor for all that is wrong about the way the IT industry sells itself to the customer”.

He points up what we SMEs already knew: being a smaller business enables you to be flexible and move quickly – none of this business of making decisions being akin to turning the QEII. As Dickinson puts it “smaller, nimble organisations have the perfect opportunity to test the water now and move ahead of some of their larger rivals” by taking advantage of what the cloud has to offer, that is if they can work out just what that is.