The annual North Bridge Venture Partners survey into cloud computing trends has revealed that more and more companies are starting to get their heads around cloud as a concept, among other findings.

The survey, entitled ‘2012 Future of Cloud Computing’, utilised supporting evidence from major players such as VMWare and Microsoft and is in collaboration with the 451 Group.

Now in its second year, the survey also noted that whilst software-as-a-service (SaaS) is still the leading service used, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will gain significantly in the next five years.

North Bridge asked 785 cloud professionals – including vendors and industry experts – about a wide range of issues impacting cloud computing, with certain trends noticeable.

Most importantly, 50% of respondents said they were “confident” that “cloud solutions are viable for mission critical business applications” – in other words, they don’t think the cloud will fail them for their business, despite …