British SMBs Lagging In Cloud Adoption Rates

British businesses are taking a much more cautious approach to cloud computing than their European counterparts.

So says a new survey from virtualisation giant VMware, which found only that 48 percent of British SMBs (small to medium businesses) had begun using cloud solutions, compared to a European average of 60 percent.

A potential reason for slower uptake of the cloud computing in the UK was offered in a report back in December from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). It warned that the slow Internet in the UK was hindering cloud uptake in this country.

Meanwhile the VMware survey of 1,616 IT decision-makers across eight countries in Europe, also found that 57 percent of UK SMBs have virtualised parts of their IT infrastructure, compared to 73 percent in Europe.

Virtualisation And The Cloud

And the research pointed to a clear link between virtualisation and the cloud, with virtualised businesses having, on average, twice as much of their IT infrastructure in the cloud than non-virtualised businesses.

Indeed, 82 percent of British SMBs that have some of their applications or infrastructure in the cloud have already gone down the virtualisation route (compared to the 3 percent that have not yet virtualised).

Meanwhile 55 percent of those UK SMBs in the cloud agreed that virtualisation made deployment in the cloud easier.

“The debate as to whether small-to-medium sized businesses are embracing the cloud has passed. With 60 percent of European SMBs already using the cloud to some extent, this research proves they have not just bought into the concept of the cloud, but are progressing well on their journey to it,” said Jürgen Kühlewein, director SMB EMEA, at VMware.

“However, the journey is far from complete,” he added. “While many organisations are realising the benefits of virtualisation and cloud computing in some aspects of their business, it is now critical for them to extend these benefits across the whole organisation.”

“Furthermore, organisations should pay close attention to the role that virtualisation can play in making the most of the cloud,” said Kühlewein.

Cloud Confidence

The survey comes after a high profile failure of Amazon’s cloud service caused thousands of websites – including Foursquare, Reddit, Quora and Hootsuite – to be knocked offline. Amazon finally restored virtually all services to its customers nearly five days later, but some are warning that confidence in the cloud has been shaken by this incident.

Despite this, the VMware survey found that SMBs are willing to move part of their infrastructure to the cloud. Unsurprisingly 56 percent of European organisations have moved their storage resources to the cloud.

Indeed, storage seems to be the most popular part of IT to move to the cloud.

A survey last month from Iconnyx, found that small businesses are using the Cloud predominantly for storage (67 percent) and website hosting (56 percent). Both business continuity and CRM scored 39 percent in that survey.

But the VMware survey meanwhile found that when it looked at software applications specifically, email and office programs were the most commonly moved to the cloud (with 61 percent and 45 percent of cloud-enabled organisations respectively).