One of the key findings of the Verizon State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud 2014 Report is that 72% of respondents expect to put more than half their workloads (including SaaS) in the cloud by 2017. As more cloud workloads are deployed and become increasingly complex, companies’ expectations of cloud providers are evolving too. Below are four needs cloud adopters say they from their cloud providers:

The importance of portability

Since most companies are using some kind of hybrid cloud model—using multiple cloud vendors and mixture of public and private cloud—portability between cloud providers has increased importance. Though using one vendor would be ideal—the reality is enterprises are mixing and matching cloud services to meet the specific needs of each cloud workload or the stage of a workload. 32% of companies that have adopted cloud said business agility was their primary driver so transferring a test and development environment or other cloud workloads to a different cloud or internal infrastructure needs to be a smooth experience.

Read the full Verizon blog here