A report from CA Technologies, entitled ‘Cloud Succeeds. Now What?’ has revealed that, for many companies polled, their cloud solutions have been more successful than they were expecting.

The train of thought here, of course, has to wonder what those expectations were, especially in a week where service level agreements (SLAs) are at the forefront following 100% SLA provider Mimecast’s outage.

Yet for companies experienced with cloud, the report notes that more sophisticated systems are being demanded, such as end-to-end automation, more flexible service-level management and – the big one – the ability to flip between CSPs.

The report defines ‘experience’ pretty highly, as should be expected for ushering in cloud’s maturation: four years and a minimum of three platforms utilised.

Unsurprisingly, software as a service (SaaS) is still the most popular platform, utilised by 68% in EMEA and 94% in the US. However, across the EMEA region, platform as …