451 Research’s latest survey shows that 41 percent of all enterprise workloads are currently running in some type of public or private cloud, and by mid-2018, that number is expected to rise to 60 percent.

When looking at the various types of cloud deployment methods, enterprises are most likely to use on-premises private cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), each accounting for 14 percent of all applications. The survey found that the usage of on-premises private cloud will remain the same while SaaS is expected to grow sharply to 23 percent of all enterprise workloads by mid-2018.

Although there has been a lot of excitement surrounding infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), 451 Research notes that only 6 percent of enterprise workloads are currently running on IaaS, representing the smallest portion for any public or private cloud type today. However, respondents showed that IaaS is likely to see the highest growth with usage predicted to double to 12 percent over the next two years.

Respondents also revealed the potential for strong growth in critical enterprise workload categories such as data and analytics and business applications. Usage for data and analytics workloads are expected to double from 7 percent to 16 percent and from 4 percent to 9 percent for business applications.

A cloud-first approach is common among enterprises with 38 percent of respondents saying they have this policy in place today. The most common triggers for increased cloud usage include things like mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, hardware refreshes, software upgrades, and data center capacity expansions.

The survey was based on research conducted in May and June of 2016 with more than 1,200 IT professionals worldwide combined with survey responses and in-depth interviews from a panel of more than 38,000 IT buyers and enterprise technology executives.