Majority of UK businesses want to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud
A significant portion of UK businesses, 63 percent of them, plan to move their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud in the near future, according to a new report by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).
The adoption rate of the Cloud among UK’s businesses currently sits at 78 percent, the same as a year before, but "substantially higher" than when the research was first conducted back in 2011, the report says. The report also says that the adoption is likely to increase to 85 percent in the next two years.
More than three quarters (77 percent) of the businesses using Cloud use at least two services, while one in eight (12 percent) use five or more.
Webhosting (57 percent), email (56 percent), eCommerce (53 percent) and collaboration services (52 percent) are the applications most likely to be hosted in the Cloud, the report adds.
When asked why they decided to go for the cloud, flexibility is the number one reason for 77 percent of those surveyed, followed by scalability (76 percent) and 24/7 service dependence (74 percent). Furthermore, 45 percent said they decided to invest in the cloud as it enables innovation, their business objective, followed by improving customer service (31 percent) and enhanced business continuity (37 percent).
"This is the sixth major body of research we have conducted into the UK end user community, and while we are continuing to analyze and report on trends and adoption rates within the UK, we also wanted to explore the issue of digital transformation and how Cloud computing is facilitating business change", stated Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF.
"It should come as no surprise that digital transformation is creeping up businesses’ agendas as they seek to stay ahead of the competition. Cloud is very much part of the digital transformation agenda, and it is clear from this research that those companies with plans to digitally transform, struggle to do so without the delivery model", added Hilton.
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