It’s no secret that cloud computing made major inroads in 2012—it’s now the go-to in service-based industries like IVR. Plum certainly does cloud computing with our IVR hosting services, but we’re not the only ones.

So the cloud is the real deal, and now everyone knows it. Here’s a look at some of the biggest trends in 2012 for cloud computing, according to CloudTweaks.com…

Studies have shown that businesses and the general public are accepting the cloud and also gaining confidence in it. Gartner reported in September that the cloud services market is growing faster than analysts thought it would.

In the IVR industry, vendors like Plum have been offering software-as-a-service for a few years now. Most businesses are familiar with it already. But it wasn’t until people starting talking about the cloud that the public found out about it. Or some of them did. Research suggests that there are still tons of people out there who don’t know what the cloud is exactly yet. But at least they’ve heard of it now.

The cloud for app development was a big hit because of its “speed, cost savings, reliability and security.” Almost half of businesses (about 40%) with business process management practices are using the cloud for some of the effort.

Enterprise companies are adopting platform-as-a-service because of its “highly reliable and scalable qualities.” (At Plum, our cloud-based IVR systems offer 99.999% guaranteed uptime and also unlimited scalability.)

Gartner research also shows that public cloud services will have grown about 20% in 2012, and the industry as a whole will total $109 billion globally by the end of the year.