The cloud is the part of the network you don't have to care about. It started out meaning the Internet. You would draw a local network diagram, then a little cloud, then the remote network. You didn't care about who owned all the links in between, where they were, how many there were etc. People have been thinking about moving things "into the cloud" well before it became a buzzword. Moving storage into the cloud was easy enough, just make a network request to send or retrieve data. You don't have to care where the data is, or even who owns the servers. This is more than "the internet" because it includes servers and storage, not just the network. Moving computation to the cloud has been trickier - Amazon EC2 gives you a lot of flexibility but it's not very "cloudy". Wolfram Alpha or Google Drive spreadsheets might be a better example.