Reserving 1% because I'd strike "lesser technical" from your final sentence. The misleading quote is simply not correct. It is misleading because it's not true. It says Confluence hosted in the cloud is not vulnerable. False statement that can mislead anyone regardless of how technical they are.
They said "lesser technical people", not "less-technical people". A more technical person might not be able to read between the lines, but a better technical person should.
Here follows the definitions I am familiar with:
"premise" - a house or building, together with its land and outbuildings, occupied by a business or considered in an official context.
"premise" - a previous statement or proposition from which another is inferred or follows as a conclusion.
(I have the privilege of worrying about this because my company uses Confluence Cloud. It's vastly inferior to our old aelf-hosted mediawiki, but at least it's not an open barn door.)
Really though, "self-hosted" would make even more sense, as companies often deploy such applications in one or more "off prem" environments anyway. I'd hardly consider my company's multi-region/multi-AZ AWS VPC to be my "premise".
We got hit by this and had to shut down and upgrade. Atlassian are taking a while to send new license keys.
This is a dangerous statement to make and should be revised to say:
> The vulnerability only affects standalone versions of the software, not the managed service of confluence provided directly by Atlassian.
The problem with the former is that lesser technical people, especially directors, might assume they're fine because their standalone instances are hosted on GCP/AWS/Azure, which counts to them as "cloud".