By Business & Finance 
A Cisco-sponsored study has indicates cloud is moving into a second wave of adoption with companies looking to the cloud fuel growth.
Organisations studied are gaining an average of $1.6m in additional revenue per application deployed on private or public cloud. They are also achieving $1.2m in cost reduction per cloud-based application.
The revenue increases were largely the result of sales of new products and services, gaining new customers, or selling into new markets. Organisations were able to attribute revenue gains to increased innovation resulting from the shifting of IT resources from traditional maintenance activities to new, more strategic, more innovative initiatives.
However, only 1% of organisations have optimised cloud strategies in place while 32% have no cloud strategy at all.
Private cloud allows better resource use, greater scale, and faster time to respond to requests, but with the added control and security of dedicated resources for a single company.
Adopting hybrid cloud can be more complex than adopting other forms of cloud. It requires workload portability, security, and policy enablement. These requirements were evident in the study, which showed that up to 70% of respondents expect to migrate data between public and private clouds (or among multiple cloud providers) and have high security and policy requirements.
