"Quite a few companies have concerns about hosting company data and applications in public cloud environments," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. "We are still in the early stages in seeing these services roll out."

It's hard to believe, in some ways, that cloud computing is still in its early stage. The cloud computing term is so overhyped and so overused today that it seems like it's been around forever.

But it's hard to find any reference to cloud computing prior to 2006. When people talked about the idea of creating on-demand, scalable and metered resource pools, it was in context of grid computing.

Indeed, when Sun Microsystems, whose longtime logo "The Network is the Computer" embodied cloud-like thinking, opened its public utility compute resource in March 2006, it was called the Sun Grid. The Sun service allowed users to order up compute capacity over the Internet and pay for it via PayPal.

On Aug. 9, 2006, Google CEO Eric Schmidt discussed at the Search Engine Strategies Conference.