The cloud is touted as offering a range of benefits – from cost savings to achieving greater scale and driving innovation within IT departments. The question remains: is there anything the cloud cannot do?

A recent report by RightScale found that cloud-based services are no longer so-called bleeding-edge technology, and three-quarters of those surveyed are adopting cloud computing. The report identified four distinct stages of cloud maturity: 1) cloud watchers; 2) cloud beginners; 3) cloud explorers; and 4) cloud-focused businesses.

Overall, the survey of 625 respondents revealed that cloud maturity does in fact matter. As cloud maturity increases, fewer organizations report significant challenges in such areas as security, governance and compliance.

The report reveals several key highlights, including the following:

• Cloud adoption is a given.
• Enterprise cloud adoption is gaining steam – and it’s multi-cloud.
• Cloud competition is heating up.
• Cloud experience pays off.
• Cloud adoption correlates with the DevOps trend.

As cloud matures, it’s clear that the business world now demands a mix of services and the answer is proving to be a multi-cloud. As such, cloud providers need to develop new capabilities quicker than ever before, especially since customers now want instant action in business dealings – whether it’s apps, services or integration, the pace is quickened, according to Channel Web.

According to the RightScale report, as the cloud matures, businesses are more readily accepting of it. Currently, companies use the cloud mainly for testing, development and customer-facing Web apps. But now, it’s also being used for running internal Web apps, mobile apps and batch processing. In addition to usage, the cloud provides many benefits including better scalability, faster infrastructure access and faster time to market for apps.

Among enterprises with a hybrid cloud strategy, 61 percent are already running apps in public clouds, 38 percent in private clouds and 29 percent in hybrid clouds.

“It is not surprising that enterprises are leaning toward a ‘public first’ approach to hybrid cloud adoption since private clouds require time to build and set up,” the report said. “As each organization’s journey to realize the full value of cloud will take many steps and will evolve over months and years. However, cloud adoption will deliver increasingly more value at each step along the way.”