The market research firm was confident enough about the answers to conclude that the previous hype is now matching actual activity.

According to the company, 64 percent of surveyed firms are increasing their SaaS cloud spending this year. 37 percent said they are spending more money on IaaS and 22 percent on PaaS. Strategy Analytics said that scalability, visibility, and manageability are keys to cloud adoption, but security, reliability and availability downtime remain the top issues that keep businesses from moving faster to cloud solutions.

"Organizations have been relying on business cloud services including email, CRM, and web and audio conferencing for more than a decade," said analyst Mark Levitt in a prepared statement.

"This Strategy Analytics survey shows that a majority of corporations have abandoned traditional on-premise software deployments for many types of application and infrastructure software. Public and private cloud computing is now the norm, not the exception."

Strategy Analytics offers the entire report entitled Business Cloud Adoption Soars According to Enterprise Q1 2012 Survey for $2000.