A new Avanade survey of 1,000 global C-level executives revealed that many businesses want to migrate their applications and services to hybrid cloud environments.

Survey researchers said many companies are predicting that more than half of their applications and services will be deployed on the hybrid cloud within an average of three years.

“Hybrid cloud gives companies the speed and flexibility they need to transform into digital businesses and enables them to focus on driving growth and outperforming their competitors,” said Mick Slattery, Avanade’s president of Hybrid Cloud, in a prepared statement.

The survey also revealed that while many businesses are prioritizing hybrid cloud adoption, some are confused about what exactly hybrid cloud means.

Researchers pointed out that 16 percent of respondents said they are able to identify the full range of benefits that hybrid cloud solutions provide, such as the ability to integrate private and public clouds and scale up and down as needed.

However, many businesses still want hybrid cloud solutions immediately.

The survey showed that most businesses are investing in hybrid cloud at a faster rate than private or public clouds, and 69 percent of companies said implementing a hybrid cloud strategy is one of their top priorities in 2015.

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What else did survey researchers find? Here’s a closer look at some of the other survey results:

“Budgets and control may be shifting away from IT, but hybrid cloud solutions represent an opportunity for IT to align itself with C-suite priorities, delivering strategic value to the business in a secure and properly governed manner,” Slattery said.

Expect the hybrid cloud market to grow

Many C-level executives want hybrid cloud solutions, which could create new opportunities for cloud services providers (CSPs) and help the hybrid cloud market grow over the next few years.

TechNavio earlier this year predicted the global hybrid cloud market would expand at a 30.16 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2013 and 2018, thanks in part to the short- and long-term benefits that hybrid cloud solutions can offer C-level executives.

“Enterprises are increasingly using hybrid cloud because they may host critical applications on private clouds and applications with relatively less security concerns on the public cloud. The hybrid cloud computing [helps] enterprises [achieve] maximum usability while minimizing the degree of faults and without the need for constant Internet connectivity,” TechNavio researchers wrote in their report.

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