Dive Brief:

• Lower total cost of ownership was the top reason executives cite for adopting hybrid cloud solutions, according to a new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value.
• Executives also pointed toward the hybrid cloud as facilitating innovation (42%), enhancing operational efficiencies (42%) and enabling organizations to more readily meet customer expectations (40%).
• The study was based on surveys of more than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries.

Dive Insight:

Cloud adoption is helping companies lower costs and expand business opportunities, but many want to take a hybrid approach and keep some processes in-house, at least for now.

Companies undertaking cloud initiatives also said they found doing so allowed them to expand into new industries (76%), create new revenue sources (71%) and create and support new business models (69%).

Though cloud adoption has clearly grown over the last several years, respondents said they currently still expect almost half of workloads to remain on-premises with dedicated servers.

The study also found the top three challenges to cloud adoption cited by respondents were perceived security or compliance risks and requirements, cost structure and "increased risk of operational disruption due to new cloud-based solution."

Executives stressed that the decision to move to the cloud must be made in a way that maximizes benefits and minimizes risk.