According to a Gartner survey the global buyers of cloud applications do so in the name of costs, innovation and agility, as CIOs use the cloud to create modern IT environments, while business leaders see a means for cost savings.

The survey covers 10 countries in 4 regions, including the UK, Germany, France, the US, Brazil, Mexico, China, India, S. Korea and Australia, and deals with the reasons organisations adopt and deploy cloud services of the SaaS, IaaS and PaaS variety.

"The most commonly cited reasons the survey found for deploying SaaS were for development and testing production/mission-critical workloads," the analyst says. "We've seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. Today, the projects are mission-critical and production grade. This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation (SFA) and email."

According to Infonetics Research the global off-premises cloud services market will reach over $200 billion by 2018, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) making around 40% of all revenues throughout the forecast period.

The analyst also confirms the the biggest companies make the cloud services ruling body, as Google is the market share leader in CaaS and PaaS, IBM is top in SaaS and Amazon leads IaaS.

Perhaps predictably N. America leads in geographical off-premises cloud services, at least until 2018.

HP and Symantec form a partnership in the name of a Disaster Recovery-as-a- Service (DRaaS) solution, one running on an HP Helion OpenStack-based cloud environment with HP providing the end-to-end service.

In turn Symantec provides the DRaaS solution. It supports replication, recovery and automated failover/failback of client IT, whether it is on-premises, managed cloud, private cloud or public cloud. It also handles and addresses specific disaster recover standards, such as PCI in the retail industry or HIPAA in healthcare, as well as recovery SLAs for systems and applications.

The days of fighting the cloud are over, Forrester Research says in its 2015 cloud forecast. Thus customers are to face major changes, be it in application architecture, portfolio and vendor relationships.

"The landscape for cloud computing changes quickly, so your business technology agenda must adapt just as rapidly," the analyst states. "Your business will earn an early mover advantage by keeping ahead of these changes."

As such Forrester has these predictions on the cloud come 2015.