Cloud Adoption Rate In UK Soars

New research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) indicates that the UK cloud adoption rate has increased by 75% since 2010.

CIF, an industry body that strives to promote transparency and best practice for online services, polled 250 senior IT and business decision makers from both in the public and private sectors in February 2015.

It claims the cloud adoption rate in the country today currently stands at 84% and 78% of cloud users have formally adopted two or more services.

The organisation also anticipates that as support ends for Windows Server 2003 later this year, cloud adoption and penetration will only increase more across the course of 2015.

“Cloud computing has come a long way in just a few short years. When we commissioned our first major research project into the UK cloud market in 2010, just 48% of organisation had consciously adopted a cloud service,” claimed CIF CEO Alex Hilton.

“According to our latest research, that figure today stands at 84%. During this time, cloud has moved from the edge of the IT estate to its centre and it is now largely regarded as just another way that we do IT.

“Importantly, it is, by and large, delivering the benefits to the industry it promised it would deliver. We know that 90% of organisations using the cloud are satisfied with it, 70% expect to up their usage over the coming year and 56% believe that it has provided them with competitive advantage,” Hilton added.

Many Planning Move To Cloud

Of the organisations found to be not using the cloud already, 12% expect to do so within a year and CIF predicts that by early 2016 86% of UK-based organisations will use at least one cloud service formally.

Users were also quizzed on the applications they anticipate being cloud-based over the next 12 months: these were CRM, DR/BU, Data Storage, email and Collaboration Services in descending order.

Meanwhile, 79% of those using the cloud or expecting to do so in the future will include consideration of cloud services within their wider IT strategy.

However, while CIF believes that the end of support for Windows Server 2003 will see more moving to the cloud, 58% of organisations were still running this, only a slight decrease from 60% in 2014.

People Still Shy Of 100% Cloud

“What is clear is that cloud isn’t yet all things to all men and that cloud will continue to sit alongside on premise solutions for quite some time to come,” claimed Hilton.

“Although more organisations than ever are committing to a 100% cloud environment, the vast majority are a long way from migrating their entire IT estates, just 15% consider their primary IT model to now be cloud and around half of businesses cannot foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the cloud, instead managing a blend of IT delivery models.

“Looking to the year ahead we have every confidence that the cloud’s momentum will be maintained, helped in no small part by the retirement of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.

“While first time adoption is likely to slow somewhat, penetration of cloud services within organisations which appears to be happening at a faster rate than we had anticipated will continue unencumbered.

“Assuming, that is, the cloud service providers can effectively put forward the business case for adoption and build further confidence amongst end users by improving levels of accountability, capability and transparency,” he added.

© 24N.biz