Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam

Verizon Communications Inc. didn’t bother to ask respondents whether their organizations have embraced the new way of consuming computing resources in its second annual study on the state of enterprise cloud adoption. The battle has already been decided. Instead, the carrier focused on how they’re going about it – and found that the traditional barriers to entry are crumbling  at an accelerating rate.

Cloud computing was first brought into the corporate world by employees frustrated with the slow pace of IT responsiveness. That gave way to a period of chaos as people provisioned their own services, but now some order is arriving. The carrier found that IT departments typically control over 80 percent of spending on third party services within their organizations, while the CIO and CTO together personally oversee 62 percent of associated purchases. Net spending on platforms such as Amazon Web Services increased as well by an impressive 35 percent.

That momentum is not expected to stop any time soon. Verizon highlights in its report that organizations expect over half of their overall technology budget to go toward cloud services within two years. The study also reveals that a parallel phenomenon is unfolding in the application landscape, where more and more workloads are moving off-premise. A full 71 percent of the respondents to the carrier’s survey said their companies run at least one mission-critical workload in the cloud, which reflects another major improvement since the early days of trend.

Organizations have grown considerably more trusting of the cloud, with 65 percent of respondents saying they don’t believe the use of third party services compromises their security and 36 percent believing that it has the opposite effect. This confidence carries over to other sides of the business as well: 71 percent of outfits expect to have public-facing applications in the cloud by 2017.

Asked why they’re so enthusiastic about moving their workloads off-premise, 31 percent of the participants in the study said that the cloud affords more agility than their private infrastructure. Only 14 percent cited cost reduction as the primary reason behind their decision to embrace the technology, and accordingly, 84 percent, said their most important priority with the cloud is service availability as opposed to realizing savings.