If you’ve been in the IT industry for awhile, you’ve no doubt noticed that it goes through one hype cycle after another.  Many of us witnessed the dot-com explosion, implosion and subsequent MSP market conversion. Watching the cloud hype cycle of the past few years is a little disturbing -- not because I lack excitement about the massive possibilities of distributed computing, utility billing, virtualization advancements and economies of scale; they are large parts of my company’s business model. What bothers me is the extent to which companies will go to make a claim about the cloud. The exaggerations and omissions -- stemming from either ignorance, lack of risk aversion or outright dishonesty -- being used to sell cloud computing and cloud storage services are just nauseating. As an officer of a company competing in this environment, it’s especially hard for me to ignore these problems with cloud storage.