According to a report from Verizon, enterprises are increasing their average monthly cloud spend by 45% with cloud environments becoming “more mainstream”.

The overall sense from the Verizon report, which was conducted between January 2012 and June 2013, was that the enterprise cloud was becoming more and more critical to business strategy.

Cloud-based storage capability went up by 90% during this time, with cloud-based memory usage increasing 100%.

The report examined the current state of the enterprise cloud, quoting a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit whereby almost half of professionals evaluate cloud models over traditional software when it came to investments.

Verizon puts this down to six primary reasons: cost; provisioning speed; compliance; focus; performance and accessibility.

Despite this however, the report notes the majority of enterprises are in “phase one” of cloud adoption, only risking low commodity items. Yet the future, as one would expect, is hybrid.

“Hybrid …