Within two years, a majority of enterprises expect to be running their workloads in the cloud.After getting past considerable concerns about privacy and security, companies are increasingly placing their faith -- and their information and services -- in the cloud.

According totechnology research firm 451 Research, the level of enterprise workloads in the cloud is expected to go from 41% today to 60% by mid-2018.Company mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, along with moves like hardware buys and software upgrades, are pushing companies toward the cloud.

Part of the reason for the growth is that business executives are moving beyond initial fears about security and privacy in the cloud. With more experience under their belts, cloud confidence has grown dramatically.451 Research say that, strong cloud growth is expected particularly in critical enterprise workload categories, like data analytics and business applications.