Private cloud adoption increased to 77 percent from 63 percent of enterprises in one year, according to a RightScale survey. And the private cloud uptake drove hybrid cloud adoption to 71 percent from 58 percent year-over-year.

The company's fifth annual "State of the Cloud Report" solicited responses in January 2016 from 1,060 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a broad cross-section of industries, then compared the results to those from January 2015. Seventeen percent of respondents used RightScale products.

Companies are each using, on average, three public clouds and three private clouds. On average, they are each running applications on 1.5 public clouds and experimenting with an additional 1.5 public clouds. They are also running applications on 1.7 private clouds and experimenting with an additional 1.3 private clouds.

Across all sizes of organizations, 44 percent of respondents use VMware vSphere environments as private clouds. OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite tied for second at 19 percent. Bare-metal clouds are being used by 15 percent of respondents.

In comparison to last year, there were noticeable increases in adoption rates of every private cloud technology. VMware vSphere/vCenter went up 11 percent. OpenStack and vCloud both increased 6 percent.

In public clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead, being used by 57 percent of respondents, which was flat from last year. But Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) grew to 17 percent from 12 percent, and Azure’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) grew to 13 percent from 9 percent.