The average American consumer does not understand the phrase cloud services, says a new study, which was conducted by Wakefield Research and commissioned by the company that develops cloud solutions, Citrix.

The survey results, based on interviews with 1,000 average Americans during the month of August, provide some fascinating insights about cloud computing.

Feign knowledge about the cloud

The survey shows that many US consumers believe “cloud” is something related to weather, or something to do with drugs, pillows, outerspace, heaven and toilet paper.

While the majority of people did not fully understand what cloud computing is, many of them often recognized that cloud computing has economic benefits and can drive business growth.

The poll shows that 29 percent of them believe that the cloud is  a “fluffy white thing” while only 16 percent associated the phrase with a connected network used to store and provide access to information via the Internet.

Nearly one fourth (22 percent) admitted to feigning their understanding about cloud computing. Out of those, 14 percent faked a comprehension of cloud concepts during a job interview while one third falsifying in the office. And the interesting one, 17 percent pretended to recognize about cloud computing during a first date.

Cloud services term widely misunderstood

The term cloud service is becoming more and more popular in recent years, and not only in the U.S., but also globally.  The cloud allows individual consumers, small and medium enterprises to significantly reduce the cost of their IT infrastructure and gain access to computing power and disk space that they otherwise could not use.

However, cloud computing was found to be widely misunderstood by even its end users. The Citrix survey found that 51 percent of users, including majority of Millennials, respond stormy weather could interfere with cloud computing. More than 59 percent believe that “workplace of the future” will become reality in the cloud.

In reality, 95 percent of American users are currently using cloud services via day-today mediums including banking, online shopping, social networking and file sharing.  One third of the respondents believe that cloud will be a “thing of the future.”

“This survey clearly shows that the cloud phenomenon is taking root in our mainstream culture, yet there is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing,” said Kim DeCarlis, vice president of corporate marketing at Citrix. “While significant market changes like this take time, the transition from the PC era to the cloud era is happening at a remarkable pace. The most important takeaway from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favorably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives.”

Many use it for few things

The majority of users (54 percent) responded to never having used cloud computing, although most of them don’t realize they already do.

About 65 percent of this group use cloud services in banking online, 63 percent shop online, 45 percent have played online games, and 58 percent of users use social networking such as Facebook and Twitter, 29 percent store photos online, 19 percent use online file sharing and 22 percent store music and video online.

Security still a concern

The cloud is seen as a great way to involve customers, clients and coworkers to boost business growth. Despite these advantages, Americans still want to limit the use of cloud computing or avoid it completely.

Some are wary about using the cloud, with 34 percent concerned over cost, 31 percent concerned about privacy and 32 percent cited security concerns.

A recent ESG Research survey revealed that security and cyber threats are concerns for security professional and majority say there is a need of the hour to implement tighter integration between security intelligence and IT operations tools such as asset management, configuration management, and network performance management to avoid the cloud security issues.