This archived TechRepublic Premium report, originally published in July 2014, is available for free to registered TechRepublic members. For all the latest research reports, 100+ ready-made policies, IT job descriptions, and more, check out TechRepublic Premium.

Some key findings in the report:

• Most are familiar with the concept of a hybrid cloud. 93% of respondents have at least heard of hybrid cloud. Most of the people not familiar with the concept are from small organizations.
• One third of 128 respondents said they were using a hybrid cloud solution. Despite the predictions cited earlier, we were a bit surprised to see so many people using hybrid cloud service. It’s possible products such Office365 are contributing to this number. Especially since Microsoft is the vendor chosen by almost half the respondents as their current public cloud vendor.
• On the private side, VMware is actually ahead of Microsoft, which is probably indicative of the adoption of virtualization and VMware vSphere specifically.
• Rogue public cloud projects aren’t driving hybrid cloud adoption. Only 10% of respondents said that their organization chose a hybrid cloud solution because non-IT departments were already using public cloud services. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say whether these findings indicate that rogue IT isn’t as prevalent as some IT pundits would have us believe or the respondents to our survey just aren’t worried about it.
• Disaster recovery and reducing hardware costs are driving hybrid cloud adoption, but security remains the number one reason why users are still wary. As cloud providers are able to improve SLAs and provide formal security documents this should become less of an issue. In a ZDNet article, Ibuken Adebayo, director of IT at Turning Point, said, “As more organizations begin to trust and subsequently invest in cloud applications, this is slowly beginning to translate into a gradual decline of on-premises enterprise software.”
• Among those currently using hybrid cloud solutions, more than half reported reliability and high availability, ease of use, cost, and time to market as positive outcomes. However, nearly one third of the same group also reported that the services didn’t work as expected, which may be due to the newness of many hybrid cloud products.
• A final key finding was the significant role bandwidth limitations still play in many organizations’ decisions not to use a hybrid cloud solution. Over half of those not using a hybrid cloud solution reported that achieving adequate network bandwidth between their on-premise cloud and the public cloud was key to that decision.