Organisations that place trust in cloud to do more than just cut costs are more likely to see revenue grow.

Those businesses that choose to use cloud to support business transformations on an ongoing basis are in a better position to make the most of cloud, although higher trust in the technology won’t alone lead to better financial results.

This is according to a Google sponsored study undertaken by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which found that enterprises with very high trust in cloud have seen a 9.1% profit rise compared to 1% by those with low trust.

The study also found that 62% of respondents who note higher cloud trust consider it to be a competitive advantage, which might explain why the adoption of cloud computing by IT organisations is projected to increase to 45% by 2019, up from 38%.

While a link between better financial results and cloud computing is suggested, the report points out that higher trust in cloud alone doesn’t lead to better results, “put simply, higher cloud trust appears to facilitate behavioural and process change within an organisation,” the report said.

The study found that the use of cloud to improve the accuracy and speed of organisational-wide change is seeing businesses more able to deliver successful business strategies. Other benefits were seen as being able to improve collaboration, brand reputation, ability to innovate and agility.

While trust in cloud is on the increase, with 52% of enterprises increasing their trust in the technology in the past three years and 15% reporting a significant rise in trust, there remains concerns over security, regulatory and compliance issues, and an inability to integrate with existing on-premise systems.

This helps to explain why 13% of organisations cite a decline in trust and only 16% say their organisation has a very high level of trust in the cloud overall.

Although barriers to adoption remain, IDC predicts that the cloud infrastructure market with pass $37bn for the year. Public cloud spending is expected to make up the majority of the infrastructure spend at $23.3bn.

The EIU study is based on a survey of 452 senior executives across ten countries.