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Hybrid cloud adoption is set to triple in the next three years with economics as the primary driver, according to new research from Peer 1 Hosting.

The study, which polled over 900 IT decision makers in the UK and North America, found cutting IT costs (49%) was the biggest IT priority within their organisations. Improving processes and operational efficiencies (45%) was also a popular response.

Currently, more than half (52%) of those polled said their primary IT approach was to use private cloud, followed by 31% for on-premise, 10% for hybrid cloud, and 7% for public cloud. Respondents expect this to significantly change by 2018, with private cloud deployments at 41%, hybrid at 28%, on-prem at 17% and public at 14%.

When asked what the key challenges were in achieving IT priorities in the coming year, security (53%) was the most cited choice, followed by data protection concerns (46%), budget constraints (39%) and lack of efficiency (25%).

The results chime in alongside current sentiment about hybrid cloud deployments and architectures. It makes sense to large organisations with complex, legacy architectures, who can dip their toes into a public cloud environment. As Sean McAvan, managing director of NaviSite Europe, penned for this publication earlier in April, the idea that certain data and workloads are better suited to a private cloud infrastructure, or a physical hosted platform, makes the decision to go hybrid a popular one.

Yet security is key – VMware, who made its relatively late push into hybrid cloud in February, has a disaster recovery set for those who are still concerned about where their data resides.

Toby Owen, vice president of product at Peer 1, noted this importance. “Hybrid cloud adoption appears to be held back by concerns largely related to security and data protection,” he said in a statement. “Clearly, these are areas where businesses cannot compromise.

“As the industry responds to this, with truly scalable, flexible and controllable hybrid cloud solutions, I believe that IT decision makers will be quicker to adopt hybrid cloud than this research suggests,” he added.