The majority of businesses think the hybrid cloud is the best option when it comes from transforming their operations, even though only a fifth are using a combined public and private cloud set-up.

According to Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud Index, 91% of businesses think a hybrid cloud approach is the ideal model to adopt, with 88% believing that application mobility across cloud platforms has the potential to “solve a lot of problems”.

However, despite overwhelming agreement, the report found that only 19% of those surveyed said that had already deployed such a model.

Findings also showed that organisations are becoming increasingly jaded when it came to opting for public cloud deployments, with 35% of respondents admitting overreliance on public cloud resulted in frequent overspending of annual budgets.

Nutanix’s survey of 2,300 IT decision makers worldwide, released on Thursday, identified that interoperability between cloud types and the ability to move applications between cloud environments was more important than cost or security.

“As enterprises demand stronger application mobility and interoperability, they are increasingly choosing hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer for Nutanix. “While the advent of public cloud has increased IT efficiency in certain areas, hybrid cloud capabilities are the next step in providing the freedom to dynamically provision and manage applications based on business needs.”

The report also highlighted that finding IT talent specialising in hybrid IT is a challenge and more than half of respondents said they are struggling to retain those with hybrid IT skills in their organisation.

This is likely to become a growing concern for businesses in the next 12-24 months and a problem that needs to be addressed if firms are to make the most of hybrid cloud infrastructure.