Seventy-four percent of organizations say they plan to move more systems to the public cloud this year, according to a study conducted by a cloud control company, HyTrust.

The survey, soon to be published, contacted more than 500 executives at large and small companies in the U.S. and U.K., looking at issues, trends, and benefits regarding the state of migration to the cloud the software-defined data center (SDDC).

It found that the migration is so far along, that organizations have already decided which platforms to use, with Microsoft Azure being the most popular at 32 percent. This platform is closely followed by VWware’s vCloud Air at 24 percent, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 22 percent.

The scale of workloads being virtualized in the infrastructure continue to rise. The study found that 61 percent of organizations are moving test/development server workloads; 54 percent are moving their network; 53 percent of active directory/directory services and storage are being moved; and 47 percent of Tier 1 server workloads plan to move as well.

Throughout the migration, business and IT professionals involved have shown concern. Their biggest dilemmas, according to the study, include data security and breaches, infrastructure-wide security and control, monitoring and visibility into cloud infrastructure and being able to meet data privacy laws, given global regulatory challenges.

The study also shows that small to midsized businesses (SMBs), or employers with 250 to 2,000 employees, are more eager to virtualize workloads than larger corporations. Sixty-four percent of SMBs say they plan to virtualize test/development server workloads, compared to 51 percent of large enterprises. Also, 47 percent of SMBs plan to move Tier 1 workloads, compared to 36 percent of large enterprises. SMBs are also higher than larger enterprises when comparing numbers of those moving monitoring of cloud infrastructure and choice of public cloud platform.

Technology companies often lead other industries in switching to virtualization and the cloud. But, information research and analysis, financial services, manufacturing, business consulting and management, healthcare, and plenty of other industries plan to virtualize additional workloads as well.