Public and private clouds currently host an estimated 41 percent of all enterprise workloads, and that figure will rise to 60 percent within the next two years as more enterprises embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure for emerging applications.

451 Research Inc. said in a newly released study of cloud deployment models that most enterprises will adopt on-premises private clouds together with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, with each one accounting for 14 percent of all enterprise apps. Private cloud adoption will remain flat however, though software services are set to rise sharply and account for 23 percent of all enterprise workloads by mid-2018.

The analyst firm was less optimistic for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), saying that only 6 percent of survey respondents said they would be running enterprise workloads on outside services, representing the smallest number of apps running on private or public clouds.

Nonetheless, 451 Research still says the number of workloads running on IaaS will double in the next two years, with application development and “web/media” tasks driving this uptake.

Big Data, analytics and business applications will be the other key drivers of cloud-based enterprise workloads, 451 Research said. Both data and distribute application workloads will double over the forecast period, it said.

The research concludes from the study that more enterprises are adopting a “cloud-first” strategy for their app deployments that prioritizes on-premises or public clouds ahead of traditional IT. Some 38 percent of respondents confirmed that this was their approach, citing drivers such as hardware and software upgrades, data center expansions and mergers and acquisitions.

“Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allow organizations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex datacenters and infrastructure,” Andrew Reichman, research director at 451 Research and lead author of the cloud workload survey, noted in a statement.

In the public cloud space, currently dominated by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, with Google and IBM both snapping at their heels, 451 Research said the race for leadership is far from over.

“The battle for cloud domination is by no means over and the high usage growth predicted points to opportunities for vendors of many kinds, including mega-scalers, hosting, hardware and software providers, integrators and consultants to expand presence as the market expands,” the researchers said.

451 Research’s cloud survey was based on interviews with more than 1,200 global IT managers between May and June 2016.

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