UK Cloud adoption rate climbs to 84%

The latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) reveals that the overall Cloud adoption rate in the UK today stands at 84 per cent, with almost four in five (78 per cent) of Cloud users having formally adopted two or more services. With the end of support for Windows Server 2003 later this year, the industry body anticipates that the adoption and penetration of Cloud services to show sizable increases over the course of 2015.

Conducted in February 2015, the research, which polled 250 senior IT and business decision-makers from both the public and private sectors, indicates a six-point increase or 8 per cent growth from the last research project in June 2014. Since the first research was conducted in 2010, the overall UK Cloud adoption rate has grown by 75 per cent.

Key findings include:
78 per cent are using two or more Cloud-based services and half of all respondents expect to move their entire IT estate to Cloud at some point. 16 per cent intend to do this as soon as practically possible, double the same figure from 2014.
70 per cent of those organisations already using Cloud expect their adoption to increase over the next 12 months, and 12 per cent of those who do not use Cloud expect to do so within a year. CIF predicts that by early 2016, 86 per cent of UK-based organisations will formally use at least one Cloud service.
The applications most users anticipate being Cloud-based over the next 12 months are (in descending order) CRM, DR/BU, Data Storage, email and Collaboration services.
Around eight in ten (79 per cent) of those who use Cloud, or expect to, include consideration of Cloud services within their wider IT strategy.
58 per cent of organisations reported running Windows Server 2003, support for which formally concludes in July 2015. In spite of the impending deadline, this figure has declined only slightly from the figure in 2014 (60 per cent).
Almost eight in ten (77 per cent) make new deployment decisions based around infrastructure refresh cycles.

Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF, commented: “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 per cent of organisations had consciously adopted a Cloud service. According to our latest research, that figure today stands at 84 per cent. 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 the industry promised it would deliver. We know that 90 per cent of organisations using Cloud are satisfied with it, 70 per cent expect to up their usage over the coming year, and that 56 per cent believe that it has provided them with competitive advantage.

“But 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,” he continued. “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 per cent 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, that 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,” Hilton concluded.