There’s something in the air. In fact, look closely and you can see it. Up there, white and fluffy, and apparently full of exciting new technology. You see, all the best new technologies are moving to the cloud, and if you haven’t moved your data to the cloud yet… well, heaven forfend.

I’ve just deleted filed two press releases in the space of two minutes that sell themselves on the back of cloud computing. The first was from respected backup specialists EMC: “EMC has today announced its first major step into cloud computing as EMC Mozy and Lenovo will now offer unlimited online backup for SMBs” to quote the first line – head to Lenovo’s Protect My Data site for details.

The second is from F-Secure, which has just launched Wellbeing 2009, its new and trendier name for its suite of security products: Internet Security 2009, Anti-Virus 2009 and Home Server Security 2009.

Apparently, with this release “F-Secure is the only anti-virus vendor to have an ‘in the cloud’ real-time protection network deployed globally”.

Now I don’t dispute for a second the marvellousness of both these new sets of technologies, but the brutal reality is that the first has very little to back up its cloud claims. So far as I can see, it’s another online backup service (and don’t get me wrong, because Mozy is among the best).

This is in stark contrast to the F-Secure press release, where the cloud computing tag is completely justified. The central idea is that any PCs protected with F-Secure take a “fingerprint” of any files that are suspected of being malicious.

F-Secure’s ferocious fleet of servers then analyse the file and if it’s suspicious they’ll feed that information to all the other PCs protected by F-Secure’s technology (DeepGuard, to give it its marketing spin).

The problem is, cloud computing is just going to become another marketing term used without any great thought to describe any service delivered over the internet. And in the end, all that will happen is that people will get confused and ignore it.

Which is a shame, as real cloud computing is – as that F-Secure example shows – a very powerful thing.

The question in my mind is; was VMWare surfing a wave during the pre-recession years, or actually driving it? Will the uber-boffins who delivered the goods, keep doing so without their Den Mother?