It’s no wonder that Amazon Web Services is approaching a $10 billion run-rate. A new poll of 1,060 companies from cloud management provider RightScale Inc. has found that 89 percent run applications outside the firewall, more than half of which are hosted on the retail giant’s very own infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Amazon’s customers are typically much further along the adoption curve than organizations that rely on rivaling providers, with only 17 percent saying that they’re still in the experimentation stage compared to 29 percent of those using Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. As a rule of thumb, the longer a company has been employing cloud computing, the more of its workloads are run off-premise, which means that it’s spending more as well.  The increased investment is a result of not only the natural jump in usage that occurs every time a new instance is provisioned, but also the widening implementation of value-added features like integration with on-premise infrastructure.

RightScale says that 71 percent of the organizations surveyed in its poll have some sort of hybrid cloud implementation in place, usually a vSphere deployment with a remote component. While that doesn’t constitute the pinnacle of the model by any means, the figure is still worthy of attention given that adoption stood just above half in last year’s study. According to the vendor, even the most privacy-minded practitioners are warming up to the prospect of extending their on-premise workloads beyond the four walls of the data center.

As a result, security dropped from the top spot on the list of most-cited barriers to cloud adoption for the first time since RightScale started its survey three years ago. Organizations are now more concerned with logistical challenges such as maintaining regulatory compliance and preventing cost overruns, which is good news for vendor and its rivals in the management automation space.

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