&gt; That&#x27;s what it has always meant to me.<p>And that&#x27;s my biggest problem with the word, and why I go to some lengths to avoid using it when talking to clients, despite a number of my employer&#x27;s (and their partners&#x27;) products including &#x27;cloud&#x27; in their actual name.<p>No two people actually agree on what the c-word actually means.  For you it&#x27;s elastic compute.  For others it&#x27;s cheap storage, or geographical diversity, or managed RAID, or an ersatz CDN, or their hosted email or wiki or some other application, or an accounting convenience (dipping into the opex, rather than the capex, bucket), or, of course, some combination of those and others.<p>The biggest problems I&#x27;ve dealt with in IT over the years stem from people having even slightly different ideas of what words mean -- so a word that involves wildly different understandings is not a recipe for tranquillity.