Public vs. Private

While public cloud leads in total breadth of enterprise adoption, more actual workloads are being handled in private clouds.

Thirteen percent of the enterprises polled are running more than 1,000 virtual machines in public clouds—but 22 percent have that number of VMs or more running in private clouds.

"The private cloud lead in workloads may represent existing virtualized environments that have been enhanced and relabeled as a private cloud," RightScale noted.

Going forward, enterprises expect to grow their public cloud usage more rapidly. Over the next year, 27 percent expect to have more than 1,000 VMs on public infrastructure, more than doubling the current number.

Private cloud workloads are also growing, but in one year the division of VMs should look more balanced.