That’s basically how I always knew it. On a Visio diagram of your network, the thing on the other side of your router was literally a cloud.

So if someone asked where your CRM was, and you weren’t doing something local like Dynamics (…vomit), well that thing was “over here, in the cloud”.

I worked at a classic "cloud" providing company. We called "the fog". That was more descriptive of the seemingly non-deterministic nature of the overall system(s).