While there has been significant hype surrounding the cloud, overall adoption has been somewhat slow during the past several years. In an effort to attract new customers and provide more customizable virtual environments, cloud service providers are making Platform as a Service offerings more widely available to boost cloud infrastructure.

As PaaS becomes recognized as a service to help businesses integrate multiple vendors and participants, adoption rates will experience a significant uptick in the next five years, according to a report by research firm Frost & Sullivan.

"Because PaaS is more than mere application development, success is not restricted to companies that have a history of commercial software development," Frost & Sullivan executive Chantel Lindeman said.

The "broken promise" of the cloud, or a common perception gap associated with cloud services around the world, remains ever present. This issue is the promise of cost reduction, which may or may not occur when an organization deploys the cloud. In many cases, companies leveraging hybrid strategies, or using one service for mission-critical solutions on-site and another outsourcing structure for less sensitive applications, are the ones that fall victim to this broken promise, Frost & Sullivan noted.

"Despite further misconceptions surrounding the issue of cloud, such as that of security risk and reliability and performance of [connectivity], private clouds have managed to ease the concerns of companies looking to implement a cloud solution," Lindeman said.

A separate report by IDC confirmed this finding, as it noted spending on private cloud architectures will expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 28 percent through 2015. By leveraging the private cloud, organizations will be able to boost performance and efficiency without jeopardizing mission-critical applications and data.