A survey of over 2000 respondents by Microsoft and 451 Research has shown that half of companies have deployed some form of hybrid cloud.

The report, which clocks in at a mammoth 75 pages (pdf here, if you’ve got an hour or two), revealed that 989 (49%) of the 2041 execs surveyed had configured a hybrid for interoperability. Of that number:

• 60% had used an on premise private cloud alongside a hosted private cloud
• 42.1% had combined an on premise private cloud with a public cloud
• 39.6% had configured a hosted private cloud with a public cloud

The news will come as validation for Redmond, who asserted in May last year that the next two years would be the “era of the hybrid cloud.”

As for cloud services used today and bought by service providers, 71% chose software as a service (SaaS), compared with hosted infrastructure services at 69%, outsourcing services at 43%, platform as a service (PaaS) at 37% and colocation services at 27%.

More than nine in 10 (91%) said they would likely buy outsourcing services and hosted infrastructure services in the next two years, compared to SaaS (89%), PaaS (85%) and colocation services (82%).

There are two ways to interpret those last figures; either as much of a muchness, or as proof of how grounded cloud technology is in enterprise. CloudTech is opting for the latter, providing more stats which show the growth of cloud as opposed to on-premise, albeit not at a huge pace.

The amount of standalone non virtualised company infrastructure is expected to shift down to 37% on average from 43%, whilst virtualised infrastructure will leap to over a third (35%) from 31% and automated and orchestrated private cloud will on average comprise 28% of companies’ models by 2016, up from 26% today.

In terms of IT budget, companies expect to spend more on outsourcing services and PaaS in the coming years. Currently 7% of IT budgets is allocated to PaaS, with the number expected to rise to 9% in two years – likewise outsourcing (10% now, 13% in two years.)

Naturally, this comes at a cost to data centres (41% now, 38% in two years), hosted infrastructure services (19% and 18% respectively) and, interestingly, SaaS (18% and 15%).

Interestingly, one in three (32.4%) organisations agreed with the statement their organisation has “a formal cloud computing strategy plan”. 35.9% said they had “a goal for the number of applications or resources that will be part of cloud”, while 23.9% defined themselves as having “a standard architecture for hosted solutions.”

The report also examined the five best practices for cloud computing projects by region: while there was a slight discrepancy, each region shared three key tenets: have a well-defined architecture for security; understand who the end users are; and have a well-defined architecture for performance.

What do you make of the survey results?