A survey of 346 cloud solution providers executives, cloud service buyers and cloud consultants evaluated attitudes toward cloud adoption and found a high percentage of respondents had adopted cloud businesses or were planning on a cloud implementation.

The survey, by the Everest Group and Cloud Connect, a conference developer owned by UBM, which is also the parent company of CRN, showed that a majority of respondents said they were committed to moving larger pieces of their IT assets to the cloud, and they plan to receive increasing business value from cloud technologies in the future.

Continue on and see the top trends in cloud adoption.

The survey's respondents said the adoption of software-as-a-service remains the strongest cloud model.

However, many said they are planning implementation of cloud infrastructure models, and private cloud models are expected to grow the most.

VMware remained the most popular cloud virtualization vendor, followed by Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM. Nineteen percent of respondents said they had no preference in virtualization vendor.

Among the leading cloud platforms, including OpenStack, popularized by Rackspace, IBM SmartCloud and CloudStack, founded by Citrix Systems, VMware was preferred by 34 percent of respondents.

The survey showed that early adoption by workloads such as application development and testing and email/collaboration will continue to move to the cloud.

However, a large percentage of enterprises said they are earmarking disaster recovery, storage and archiving needs as they plan for cloud infrastructure implementation.

A large majority of the survey's respondents said they had met their objectives in the cloud.

The goals included cost savings, flexible infrastructure, quicker time to market and higher satisfaction.

Non-vertical, general purpose clouds are used by 69 percent of the respondents.

However, industry-specific solutions used by 15 percent of respondents, or a combination of industry-specific solution with general purpose clouds used by 17 percent, show a significant adoption.

IT managers, in conjunction with business leadership, comprise the primary decision-making group for cloud adoption decisions, with 67 percent of respondents listing that segment.

Cloud investments attract higher involvement from C-levels executives, compared to other IT purchase decisions, the survey said.

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