UK Cloud Adoption Slower Than US, Brazil, and Australia

Another day, another cloud report claiming the UK is lagging behind other countries when it comes to cloud adoption.

This time the report is from Intel Security, which picked the brains of 1,200 IT professionals from the US, UK, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France and Germany.

Intel found that whilst the average organisation is using 43 cloud services, the UK ranked slowest in terms of cloud adoption with an average of just 29 cloud services in use per organisation.

These services could range from full blown cloud computing from vendors such as Google or AWS, down to consumer-orientated storage services like Dropbox.

Budget

The UK’s also lagging behind when it comes to cloud in the IT budget, said Intel Security.

On average, Intel’s survey respondents expect 80 percent of their organisation’s IT budget to be dedicated to cloud computing services in 16 months’ time.

But the UK is much slower, expecting to reach this target in around 28 months’ time. Out of all countries in Intel Security’s report, this was the longest time.

Intel Security’s EMEA CTO Raj Samani told TechWeekEurope that one reason for the slower adoption is security concerns in the cloud.

“We’ve all been well aware of the major security considerations associated with cloud computing for some time but, in reality, cloud technology is a huge business opportunity,” he said.

“The UK may appear to lag behind in terms of cloud adoption and trust when compared to other countries such as Brazil and the US, but we are recognising the business benefits of the cloud and adopting new cloud technologies in Great Britain.”

When it comes to security and compliance, a majority of respondents listed compliance with data regulations as a primary concern across all types of cloud deployments.

And more than one in five respondents expressed their main concern around using SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) is having a data security incident, and correspondingly, data breaches were a top concern for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and private clouds. On other hand, however, results found that less than a quarter (23 percent) of enterprises are aware of data breaches with their cloud service providers.

“The cloud is the future for businesses, governments and consumers,” said Jim Reavis, chief executive officer of the Cloud Security Alliance.

“Security vendors and cloud providers must arm customers with education and tools, and cultivate strong relationships built on trust, in order to continue the adoption of cloud computing platforms. Only then can we completely benefit from the advantages of the cloud.”

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