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.
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.