Industry analyst and author Joe McKendrick breaks down a recent Survey of 1,000 plus technology managers on their company’s cloud adoption and use.

First on Forbes, Mr. McKendrick reports that enterprises surveyed used on average six cloud services. Survey respondents were using or piloting at least six different clouds, mostly a combination of public and private projects. The survey also found a cloud workload split based on number of employees:

• Businesses with more than 1,000 employees were more heavy on private workloads
• Businesses with less than 1,000 employees were typically more heavy on public workloads

Mr. McKendrick comments on ZDNet, “Not too long ago, cloud computing lurked in the shadows, seen as a workaround to bottlenecky IT departments. Lately, however, that perception seems to have turned around almost entirely. Organizations are almost pleading with IT managers to help them navigate the new cloud world.”  With cloud adoption hitting a high the survey found that more businesses are moving to central IT management to plan for cloud use across the organization and  44% of the respondents up from 31% in 2015 acknowledge the role of central IT to set cloud policies.

As far as challenges, the survey found that one major concern of enterprise leaders (it even topped security in this year’s study) is having enough resources and knowledge on-hand to manage or carry out their cloud strategies. Leaders are also worried about budget but the article points to new tools and methodologies, such as DevOps, as possible answers to help them meet demand.

Overall the survey found that it is a hybrid cloud world out there, where organizations are looking for the “right” cloud to meet their needs.