Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison believes cloud is just water vapor.

All the buzz in web hosting these days is around cloud hosting. From large providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the Rackspace Cloud, to a whole bunch of tiny providers, you can’t find a corner on the Internet that isn’t talking about or trying to offer up a cloud service. But what exactly is cloud? If you aren’t quite sure, you’re not alone. A recent independent cloud hosting study of 200 IT decision makers showed that 88 percent of them do not use cloud technologies, while 39 percent said that their lack of knowledge is preventing them from adopting it. And 24 percent were reluctant to use cloud because of perceived security risks. But almost half of the respondents did say they are considering cloud hosting with the majority of them citing scalability and flexibility as the key reasons.

So is cloud hosting the wave of the future? If you are to believe Oracle’s colorful co-founder, Larry Ellison, cloud is not only the future of computing, but it is the present, and the entire past. He comically referred to cloud as “water vapor” in a recent rant and writes it off as just a cutesy term for what we’ve already come to know as software as a service, on-demand, or just simply the Internet. So, if you’re feeling cloudy around cloud computing, don’t feel bad – even seasoned industry veterans can’t agree on exactly what it is.