European cloud adoption has been lend by Scandinavia, a new report from Eurostat shows, with Finland, Sweden and Denmark taking the top three spots.
That’s according to the European Union’s statistical office, which tracked “use of cloud computing services” between 2014 and 2018.
UK Ranks Sixth: Huge Room for Growth
Yet in a report that ranked the UK sixth – far ahead of other major European economies like Germany (19) Spain (20) and France (22) – Eurostat found that just 26 percent of European enterprises were using the cloud.
The figure drives home the scope for growth in cloud services providers, particularly among the continent’s smaller enterprises.
(IBM holds hybrid cloud, for example – referring to a combination of closely orchestrated public and private cloud services along with the use of in-house data centers – as a “emerging $1 trillion growth market” and estimates 80 percent of global businesses workloads are still managed on-premises).
These European enterprises are mostly using cloud services to host e-mail systems and store files in electronic form, the report found, suggesting vast scope for growth in a market currently dominated by AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM.
European Cloud Adoption: Advanced Services use is Limited
Of the users, 55 percent are using “advanced cloud services relating to financial and accounting software applications, customer relationship management or to the use of computing power to run business applications.”
Eighteen percent are using public cloud services, with 11 percent using private cloud, Eurostat found, with large enterprises moving much faster to adopt services, as use climbed 21 percent between 2014 and 2018.
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In 2018, among enterprises that used cloud computing services, 55 percent were “highly dependent” on them, while 41 percent used none of the advanced services.
The majority of enterprises in the manufacturing sector (51 percent) belonged to the upper-medium dependence group, while the majority in information and communication (71 percent) reported using advanced services and hence belonged to the high dependence group, Eurostat found.
Mike Guggemos, CIO at technology services provider Insight, said in an emailed statement: “It’s no surprise that the UK is amongst the continent’s biggest consumers of off-premise services. However, there are still three main concerns that hold back cloud adoption in organisations. The first is the fear of vendor lock-in: with the market evolving at such speed, many IT decision-makers are hesitant to fully commit to adoption, knowing that it could lock them into one of the big providers’ cloud ecosystems.”
“The second concern is security: while much has been made of this point, it is seldom pointed out that the big cloud service providers spend vast amounts on cloud security and have mature standardisation models within their systems which enable them to react far faster to any issues than most companies. And the third concern is financial. Many cloud systems are more expensive to buy over time than on-premise solutions. However, in a well-considered and strategic deployment, benefits usually outweigh cost differences over time.”
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