North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOm Research have looked at the state of cloud computing, as well as its future. After surveying 855 respondents, including business users, vendors, and IT decision-makers, they have found that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) is still the most in-demand use for the cloud, among other interesting bits of information.

According to the report, cloud adoption is still on the rise. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed are using some sort of cloud platform, an impressive increase from last year’s 67 percent, but still within GigaOM’s forecasts. Included in those forecasts are predictions that the market will reach over $158 billion by 2014, as there is more growth still on the way.

The use of SaaS has grown significantly since 2012, with 63 percent of the respondents using it. A good 45 percent are also using Infrastructure-as-a-Service, while Platform-as-a-Service isn’t quite caught up yet, but almost three-fourths of the respondents have stated that they expect to use it.

When it comes to what the applications are used for, 52 percent of the organizations use them to advance business priorities, compared to the 36 percent that use applications to help get IT priorities ahead. The cloud itself is mostly used for business activities, such as file sharing, productivity, and content management.

There are still some obstacles to cloud adoption, of course. Security concerns are the greatest issue, but others have expressed concerns regarding interoperability, being locked into a single vendor, and complexity. Regulatory compliance and privacy are also stated as inhibitors to cloud computing adoption, although as with all issues of that nature, there will be solutions in due time.

The report clearly shows that the cloud is still growing at a great rate, but even so, it has a ways to go. There are still plenty of companies out there who have reservations about taking to the cloud, as the technology is still imperfect, but it’s improving at a steady rate, and as it does, more people take to it for all the advantages and benefits the cloud has to offer.