(Chaparral Supercell 2 image by Greg Lundeen, public domain)

A study has found that a large percentage of Americans are a little foggy on what cloud computing actually is.

A market survey (PDF) by Wakefield Research, for cloud computing firm Citrix, asked "1006 nationally representative American adults, aged 18 and older" what they know about the cloud. The results were, well, unsurprising really, when you consider how confusing tech terms can be for the non-tech-minded.

The biggest chunk of respondents — 29 per cent — thought that "the cloud" is something to do with meteorology, while only 16 per cent first thought of computing. A whopping 51 per cent believe that a storm could play havoc with cloud computing.

However, one in five of the respondents admitted to pretending to know what cloud computing was, and three in five believe that the cloud is the "workplace of the future".

We would like to know more about the survey's methodology, but the results make sense — a 1993-1994 survey of worldwide university students found a global median of high-level technophobia was at 40 per cent among that demographic.

But a lack of know-how doesn't mean the technology is inaccessible. While 54 per cent said that they have never used the cloud, 95 per cent of these respondents actually use the cloud for online banking, online shopping, social networking, online gaming, media storage and file-sharing, all without realising it.

Via www.digitaltrends.com