Cloud in and of itself is perfectly fine and dandy and provides great flexibility, resiliency and decreases restore times (as opposed to hardware failure rebuilds or failed software updates).

What it doesnt do is guarantee to make things that much cheaper (varies on a case by case basis obviously), this is a common misconception.

The issue that I see is that people just say "cloud" without really thinking about what it is and the forms it can take.

I too am a little iffy re: the public cloud (for the reasons previously mentioned in another post), however, a private cloud offers a lot of productivity gains for a company. You still need to make an investment in hardware, software and skillsets, but the way in which you use that hardware suddenly becomes a lot more dynamic.

My 2 cents (disjointed sentences supplied free of charge)