The fifth annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey, conducted by venture capital firm North Bridge in partnership with Wikibon, leaves no doubt that the biggest cloud computing question facing corporations is no longer “whether” but “how much”.

The 2015 survey of 952 cloud adopters in 38 countries reveals that cloud adoption has reached record levels in both business and IT functions. Significantly, IT organizations are coming on board in a big way as they attempt to rein in rogue cloud usage and create structure and governance standards.

The reasons companies are adopting cloud platforms are changing, as are the concerns. For example, business agility enabled by cloud platforms leapt from fourth to second in importance over the last five years. At the same time, concerns about the cost of cloud services has grown significantly over the same time period.

Cloud use is most prevalent among sales and marketing groups (81.3 percent), business analytics (79.9 percent), customer service (79.1 percent) and human resources (73.5 percent). Cloud’s surging popularity in HR is particularly noteworthy, since it was among the lowest adopters in the initial 2011 survey.

There’s also some unsettling news for the vendors and the channel in the results. Three quarters of respondents say they’re using fewer than 10 cloud providers, a fact that indicates that consolidation may be coming. Also, 70 percent of corporate customers report that they interact directly with their cloud providers rather than go through third parties.

The results also validate the broadly accepted view that hybrid cloud is growing in importance. While corporate strategies are mainly focused on public (up 43 percent over last year) and hybrid (up 19 percent), interest in private cloud has plunged by nearly 50 percent.

The full survey was released and discussed in detail in a Dec. 16 webcast featuring North Bridge General Partner Jim Moran @jimmoran1 and Wikibon Lead Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and moderated by SiliconANGLE Enterprise Editor Paul Gillin (@pgillin). Watch the video replay below (59:00). A related CrowdChat is archived here.