Cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88% (CIF)

Research completed by Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has shown that UK businesses are making strides in adopting the cloud.

Cloud adoption rate in the UK now stands at 88%, with 67% of users expecting to increase their adoption of cloud services over the coming year.

With cloud-based technologies such as Office 365, Datto and Gamma Horizon, businesses are clearly seeing the power behind adopting the cloud and reaping the rewards. Cloud computing offers organisations the flexibility that on-premise solutions simply aren’t able to do.

The 88% adoption figure is a clear sign that a substantial portion of UK businesses are adopting cloud technologies. This percentage however doesn’t indicate how many of these businesses have a cloud strategy vs the businesses adopting tools that just happen to work in the cloud. Having a clear focus on adopting cloud technologies to suit business needs is something all businesses should be moving towards to compete and succeed in their sector.

The top three reasons for initially adopting cloud services are flexibility of delivery (74%), operational cost savings (72%) and scalability (65%).

The cloud allows your business to scale and grow.

If organisations find they need to rapidly increase cloud capacity they are able to do so easily, equally if there is a need to scale down that can also be done with the cloud. Operational agility is ranked as a top driver for cloud adoption for CIOs and IT directors according to Gartner.

By 2020 three-quarters of respondents expect to have adopted cloud-based video-conferencing systems and the adoption of cloud for data backup/disaster recovery (63%).

Disaster recovery should be on every business’s agenda as we continue to see a rise in cyber-attacks such as Ransomware and cases of human error (such as the lost Heathrow USB stick). Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions such as Datto are paving the way for organisations looking for a reliable, secure platform that removes the need to pay large upfront costs by working on a monthly subscription model.

CIF research showed 54% of those surveyed expect to eventually move their entire IT estate to remotely hosted cloud services

TSG is a big advocate of teams and departments working collaboratively even from remote locations. With 42% of the TSG workforce made up of homeworkers we must adopt tools that put productivity and performance at the top of our agenda.

The CIF survey results reveal that since the first research was conducted in 2010, the overall cloud adoption rate has increased by 83%, with an increase of 5% since last year.

The cloud gives smaller businesses access to enterprise-level technologies. These transformational technologies have previously only been available to organisations with big budgets that have the ability to outlay large capital at once. This gives small to medium size businesses a real competitive advantage in the market.

Have you started your journey to the cloud yet? Speak with our experts about how your business could reap the rewards of cloud technologies.