The latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has revealed that the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88 per cent, with 67 per cent of users expecting to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year. However, the industry body predicts that the vast majority of companies will be maintaining hybrid IT estates for some time to come.
Conducted in February 2017, the research, polled 250 IT and business decision-makers in large enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and public sector organisations. The results revealed that since the first research was conducted in 2010, the overall cloud adoption rate has increased by 83 per cent, with an increase of 5 per cent since last year. There has been a more significant increase in cloud adoption amongst small and public sector organisations, who have previously trailed behind overall adoption, with adoption rates now standing at 82 per cent for both, up from 54 per cent and 62 per cent, respectively, a year ago.
The majority of respondents (58 per cent) described their organisation as having a hybrid approach to IT and 54 per cent expect to eventually move their entire IT estate to remotely hosted cloud services, with 8 per cent of the smallest organisations in the sample having already done so. Despite this, inhibitors to cloud adoption still remain, including concerns over data privacy (62 per cent) and a lack of budget (35 per cent), meaning that a ‘cloud-everything’ model is still not yet feasible for all organisations.
Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF said, “this research highlights how far the IT landscape has come since we first conducted this research in 2010. We are entering an unprecedented time of change as digital technologies disrupt entire industries and customer expectations. Cloud is critical in enabling companies to cope with this change and this research highlights how organisations are increasingly and consistently warming to the cloud delivery model, especially as they begin the realise the benefits to be had from migrating their apps and infrastructure to the cloud.
“Although a growing number of companies can foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the cloud - with UK businesses steadily adopting a ‘cloud first approach’ - this change won’t happen overnight. While smaller businesses are able to make the logical step to remove their depreciated hardware assets and move entirely to the cloud, this is less feasible for larger organisations with heavy infrastructure investments. Looking to the future, we are certain that cloud’s momentum will continue, as cloud users move ever more parts of their estate and take on more complicated migrations.”
The research is available as a White Paper (20) and can be downloaded from: https://www.cloudindustryforum.org/content/cloud-driving-business-transformation
