A recent report from CA Technologies and Management Insight Technologies entitled “The Arrival of ‘Cloud Thinking’: How and Why Cloud Computing Has Come of Age in Large Enterprises” sought to uncover how IT executives at large companies have been using and considering public and private cloud models and what the perceived benefits and barriers are.

The study relied on the insights of 434 IT professionals in North America and Europe and noted that overall, “translating virtualization into the cloud seems very tangible, if not simple. Organizations embarking on this voyage will face a learning curve of managing virtual sprawl, automating virtual environments and integrating public clouds.”

Among the key conclusions of the report is that “enterprises are active in the cloud and their virtualization efforts are contributing to broader ‘cloud thinking’ which means that the cloud is coming of age within large organizations and aligning IT decision makers and implementers around a cloud computing platform.”

However, while ‘cloud thinking’ might be making its way into the enterprise mindset, how “cloudy” can this new way of thinking be considered if it is only for non-mission critical applications?

According to the data collected from surveys, “over 80% of large organizations (1000+ employees) have at least one cloud service and more often they have six. Collaboration services lead these deployments, with hosted email, anti-virus/spam filters and web conferencing the most common applications being deployed into the cloud by large enterprise.”

This is a common trend among large organizations—they have finally taken steps to deploy many of their internal, non-mission critical activities to the cloud, but it remains to be seen what percent of them are actually sending their business-essential operations into the ether.

In CA Technology’s survey of large enterprises, “47% of their mission critical applications run on non-virtualized infrastructure today.” However, they predict that in two years time this will drop by 17%; Seventeen percent in two years isn’t much, which might indicate the idea that there are certain applications that IT wants complete discreet control over.

There are wildly fluctuating numbers across analyst channels about what level of mission-critical applications are being sent to the cloud—and what model those cloudy IT paradigms take. CA Technology sees that there are many virtualized applications that are core to business but that this number will remain flat.

As one might imagine, the major barrier for putting more mission-critical applications in the cloud is security in addition to perceived control—a fact that is especially defined for enterprises looking at public versus private cloud models.