Public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service has moved beyond testing and development to become a central part of IT infrastructure for many midmarket and enterprise organizations, according to the results of a new survey released Wednesday.

In a VMware-commissioned survey of more than 240 IT professionals in the U.S. and Europe, research firm Enterprise Strategy Group found that 80 percent are using IaaS for production workloads, and 67 percent are entrusting their mission critical workloads to IaaS.

In terms of cloud services, 70 percent of survey respondents are using storage, 58 percent are using on-demand compute and 53 percent are using disaster recovery. The survey also shows that 78 percent of respondents are choosing public cloud IaaS services that are compatible with their own private cloud and data center infrastructure.

[Related: VMware's 'Project Zephyr' Challenges Amazon, Microsoft In Public Cloud Battle]

Wendy White, vice president of marketing at Tier 3, a Bellevue, Wash.-based VMware vCloud service provider partner whose customer base is primarily midmarket and enterprise customers, is seeing similar trends as those outlined in the survey.

"Today, we see applications ranging from large scale Exchange environments to essential line of business and back office applications, including financial applications," White said in an interview. "Because the vast majority of customers tend to use a secure direct connection and also extend their Active Directory environment, our cloud has become a virtual private extension of their enterprise."

While the results of the survey are not all that surprising, the timing of its release is interesting.

VMware does not currently have a public cloud offering to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and instead relies on its vCloud partners to deliver these services. But in August, sources told CRN that VMware was working on a public cloud IaaS offering, code-named Project Zephyr, which would mark its entry to the space.

VMware created Project Zephyr because vCloud service provider partners have been slow to build out the infrastructure and business model for public cloud IaaS, and the fast pace of the competition spurred the vendor to action, sources told CRN at the time.

More recently, sources told CRN that VMware's public cloud IaaS initiative is currently in beta and on track for release sometime next year, though it is no longer known internally as Project Zephyr.

PUBLISHED OCT. 31, 2012