By Jamie Thomas, Forbes.

Cloud computing is no longer a new trend, but business as usual for many. In fact, Gartner says that more than 50 percent of large enterprises have deployed clouds in their organizations.

But what about the other 50 percent — what’s keeping them on the fence? For those businesses that are still considering when and how to jump into cloud, here’s three cloud attributes that every business and institution can benefit from:

1. Flexibility: Music Mastermind, an entertainment and technology startup offering unique applications for creating and sharing music, relies on a hybrid cloud solution to support its flagship mobile music game, Zya. Leading up to game launch, Music Mastermind sought a scalable solution, which could support global traffic demands during peak periods while also providing the needed bandwidth to support ongoing application development.

Music Mastermind chose a hybrid cloud solution to host Zya. The private cloud portion consists of easy-to-deploy hardware infrastructure integrated across two Internet point-of-presence locations and the computational power needed to deliver the game to customers in 155 countries. Each center’s cloud can create 160 virtual instances and support an estimated 400,000 active users.

To supplement the private cloud, Music Mastermind also is deploying a public cloud offering, which also ensures consistent, high-quality game delivery, giving Music Mastermind the flexibility to successfully manage increased demand and provide additional scale when demand for Zya spikes. The high-speed public cloud infrastructure can create 1,000 virtual servers in each of its locations and is expected to be able to host Zya from 40 data centers across 15 countries and five continents by the end of 2015.

2. Control: French Managed Services Provider Zetark was looking to rapidly bring its cloud storage offering to market. The MSP needed a flexible, efficient platform for enterprise cloud storage services that could be deployed quickly. They also sought a self-service cloud infrastructure that would give them complete control to meet their precise IT needs — something public cloud offerings could not provide.

Zetark chose a pre-configured solution with a fully integrated set of server, storage, network and management resources. The infrastructure system can anticipate resource needs and features the ideal combination of performance and cost-effectiveness to power Zetark’s platform. The company was able to fully deploy the solution in just two weeks, as opposed to the typical two-month timeframe that’s required for such services.

In addition, Zetark rolled out a self-service private-cloud option for customers, which allows them to use a Web portal to develop a new, fully configured Linux virtual server in just 30 seconds. The flexible, integrated infrastructure also gives Zetark the ability to perform granular billing based on precise usage of memory, disk and processing resources for individual customers.

3. Efficiency: Red Bull Racing, the world’s leading Formula One racing team, relies on simulation and virtual analysis running in a private cloud to design and produce custom race cars. Cars are completely modeled in the virtual world, and the team must process more than 30,000 engineering changes to a single Formula One car each year. Changes are made and precise parts created for conditions on specific racetracks regularly — sometimes going from design to production to installation in less than a week.

An efficient IT infrastructure that can seamlessly handle complex enterprise workflows, including product lifecycle management and enterprise resource planning, is vital to the team’s success. Red Bull Racing implemented high-performance computing infrastructure and private cloud services to drive its Formula One innovation. The solution enables greater resource utilization and performance gain, allowing the team to perform design applications and real-time analytics. The cloud infrastructure is sized to efficiently handle peak activity periods on race days without the risk of critical IT failure.

The team’s Platform computing and cloud capabilities have given Red Bull Racing the competitive advantage needed to win both driver and constructor championships for the past four consecutive years.

Launching and hosting a new mobile game, deploying dynamic cloud storage services, designing and building winning Formula One cars are all very different applications of cloud technology, but each one demonstrates the benefits and value of cloud today. The benefits of a cloud-based solution are extensive, and we expect to see more companies make the move to a more flexible, controllable and efficient cloud infrastructure to support their IT needs and business requirements.

Jamie Thomas is IBM’s General Manager for Storage and Software Defined Systems. You can follow her on Twitter at @tjamieibm.