A survey of over 2000 respondents by Microsoft and 451 Research has shown that half of companies have deployed some form of hybrid cloud.

The report, which clocks in at a mammoth 75 pages (pdf here, if you’ve got an hour or two), revealed that 989 (49%) of the 2041 execs surveyed had configured a hybrid for interoperability. Of that number:

• 60% had used an on premise private cloud alongside a hosted private cloud
• 42.1% had combined an on premise private cloud with a public cloud
• 39.6% had configured a hosted private cloud with a public cloud

The news will come as validation for Redmond, who asserted in May last year that the next two years would be the “era of the hybrid cloud.”

As for cloud services used today and bought by service providers, 71% chose software as a service (SaaS), compared with hosted infrastructure services …