A majority of IT professionals are looking once again to the cloud as a new way to drum up profit-but this time, this “Second Wave” of cloud adoption could come in the form of business innovation as well as revenue increases.

According to a new study from Cisco (CSCO) and IDC called “Don’t Get Left Behind: The Business Benefits of Achieving Greater Cloud Adoption,” IDC surveyed more than 3,600 enterprise executives about their current and planned cloud usage, and found that 53 percent of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years.

Of those surveyed, 64 percent of respondents are either using or planning to utilize a hybrid cloud strategy, with 44 percent using or planning to use a private cloud for their business.

So why the sudden renewed interest in cloud? Cisco’s Senior Vice President of Global Cloud and Managed Services Sales Nick Earle said customers realized private and hybrid cloud offer several distinct advantages, including increased security, better performance and cost reductions that can help businesses get a leg up on the competition.

However, low cloud adoption among many companies may put a damper on the proposed profitability of cloud computing, as only one percent of companies surveyed currently have an optimized cloud strategy in place, according to IDC. Thirty-two percent of companies do not have any cloud strategy at all.

Companies with the most underdeveloped cloud programs in place have the most work ahead of them but also the greatest opportunity for growth and expansion, according to the study. IDC said companies with little to no cloud maturity stand to increase their revenue by more than 10 percent as well as reduce IT costs by up to 77 percent. Even companies with the highest level of cloud adoption stand to gain an average of $1.6 million in revenue per application deployed on private or public cloud, with $1.2 million in savings per cloud-based application.

Cisco said private cloud adoptees are most likely to benefit from better resource use, greater scale and faster response time in addition to a set of dedicated resources. Hybrid cloud adoptees are bound to have a slightly trickier path ahead of them, but benefit from the ability to keep some of their resources in-house.

Currently, companies in the United States and Latin America exhibit the highest level of mature cloud adoption worldwide, with companies in Japan lagging the farthest behind. Subsequently, manufacturing, IT, finance and healthcare are the industries with the highest level of mature cloud adoption, with government/education and professional services ranked among the lowest adoptees.

Cisco used the study to launch its new Business Cloud Advisor tool, a free service that allows Cisco partners to benchmark themselves against other companies and help them determine which cloud deployment option is best for their needs. The tool will work in tandem with Cisco’s previously announced Partner Cloud Professional Services offerings to help partners build professional services based on the company’s portfolio.