Cloud washing is a term used to refer to the often deceptive attempt to rebrand an existing product or service by associating the buzzword cloud with it. Within a financial construct, there is a parallel that describes the practice of inflating financial results for a company's cloud business by redefining existing services and products as cloud services. A typical example of this is referring to access to any application or service over the internet through a browser as cloud computing, just because you are receiving the service over the internet.
Another example is the traditional application service provider (ASP) model where a third party offers individuals, and companies access over the internet to applications and services that would normally have been located in their own personal or enterprise computers. This is often marketed as a SaaS, but there are...