UK cloud adoption rate now at 84 percent says Cloud Industry Forum

The overall cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 84 percent, according to the latest research from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), with those companies using at least one cloud service.

The research also shows that almost four in five (78 percent) of cloud users have adopted two or more cloud services.

With the end of Microsoft support for Windows Server 2003 later this year, the industry body anticipates that the adoption rate of cloud services will show further large increases over the course of this year, as more organisations put their servers into the cloud instead.

The research polled 250 senior IT and business decision-makers across both the public and private sectors – including enterprises and SMBs – this February. It showed that cloud take up went up 8 percent when compared to CIF’s previous research in June 2014.

The survey found that half of all respondents expected to move their entire IT estate to the cloud “at some point”, with 16 percent intending “to do this as soon as practically possible”.

The applications most users anticipate being cloud-based over the next 12 months are CRM, disaster recovery/backup, data storage, email and collaboration services, in that order.

Alex Hilton (pictured), CEO of CIF, said: “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 percent of organisations using cloud are satisfied with it, 70 percent expect to up their usage over the coming year, and that 56 percent believe that it has provided them with competitive advantage.”

He added however that around half of businesses cannot foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the cloud. They will instead manage a blend of IT delivery models, he said.