These days everybody seems to be turning to the cloud and the trend has gone global.

“Today cloud services evoke an understanding and expectation of scalability, agility and value-for-money on a pay-as-you-go basis that can therefore fit the needs of the smallest business or consumer to the largest enterprise or government,” the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) stated in a recent white paper. “It is less technology and more about challenging the fundamentals of how you manage IT operations (and therefore business) efficiently in an online world.”

According to recent findings by the CIF, the increasingly amorous feelings for cloud computing have resulted in almost half of the UK companies deploying some type of cloud computing within their operations.

 The cloud is no longer a “nebulous business buzzword,” according to CIF, as 48 percent of all organizations polled said they consciously use cloud computing in some way. Moreover, of those polled, the majority of UK organizations prefer the private cloud over the public cloud.

“According to the research the overwhelming reason given for initially adopting cloud-based services is the flexibility that it brings to the organization,” the study reports. “This was identified by 53 percent of respondents of the entire sample.”

The small and medium businesses (SMB) as opposed to the larger organizations are now recognizing the benefits of employing cloud computing as the survey revealed that organizations with under 20 employees placed greater value on flexibility (63 percent).

UK companies also overwhelmingly reported that they were happy with their cloud computing practices, as 94 percent of those currently using cloud services said that they were happy with the results of their use of the cloud.

“The benefits of the cloud have been known for some time, not least its rapid deployment, reliability, scalability and pay-as-you-go financial model,” the report states. “What appears to be happening in the market is that this message, for so long evangelised by vendors and IT channel alike, is being heard, and actioned on, by organizations seeking to expand or change their IT capability in support of their organizational performance.”

In other cloud computing news, Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine has named cloud computing solutions provider NaviSite (News - Alert) one of the 100 Top Cloud Computing Vendors, according to a company statement.

The list of the top 100 vendors, published in CRN, names cloud vendors and solutions that are particularly innovative.