Cobweb Solutions, one of the largest independent cloud hosting providers in Europe, in association with the Cloud Industry Forum, today announced the results of a large-scale survey into the business adoption of cloud computing.

The research, undertaken earlier this year, polled 250 senior IT and business decision-makers from small, medium and large enterprise private businesses as well as the public sector.

Cobweb discovered that whilst cloud use is soaring among business users in the UK, the final decision making falls to the head of IT/CIO in almost three fifths of (59%) organisations. This poses a risk that businesses are failing to see the holistic potential of integrated cloud solutions and instead may just see cloud computing as a new delivery mechanism for software.

Ash Patel, Director of Business Transformation at Cobweb

Ash Patel, Director of Business Transformation at Cobweb explained, “Using a cloud computing solution can fundamentally enhance the way an organisation does business, from the back-office business software to how sales teams and customer service personnel do their jobs in the field or on their premises. Most excitingly, it offers the liberating ability to build entirely new services that customers and partners can easily access and make part of their daily lives. Making best use of this liberating technology is a question not solely for the IT team, but for the whole board of directors who can use the cloud to shape a new and more effective way of doing business.”

The research found that:

• UK cloud penetration has reached a high of 84 per cent as more businesses turn to cloud for all their business needs
• 78 per cent of businesses are using more than one cloud-based service and half of all respondents expect to move their entire IT estate to cloud at some point
• 70 per cent of those who already use the cloud expect their adoption to increase over the next 12 months, and 12 per cent of those who do not use the cloud expect to do so within the next year
• Cloud service adoption by UK businesses expected to increase by 12% by 2016

Julian Dyer, CIO of Cobweb

Julian Dyer, CIO of Cobweb explained, “Cloud is an IT solution to a business challenge, and whilst it makes sense for the CIO to drive the decision, we hope that the whole board will be involved in cloud projects. Properly implemented, cloud touches all of the C-suite from IT in delivery, the CEO and COO in business operations, and the CFO, as with all new financial models. If all aren’t behind the project the business as a whole will certainly miss out on a holistic solution that can benefit the business much more than a mere new software solution on its own.”

The factors inhibiting those slower to move to the cloud include:

• 70 per cent cited concerns about data security and 61 per cent about data privacy when moving to the cloud, and security concerns are preventing certain applications from being migrated
• However, the vast majority (99%) of all respondents have never experienced a breach of security when using a cloud service
• Some organisations are required to store certain applications in specific locations, including accounting and finance (49%), data backup/disaster recovery (43%) and data storage (43%)
• Of those who are required to store data in specific locations, just under half (47%) state that they are required to store it in the UK

The applications most likely to be cloud-based today are webhosting, collaboration services, ecommerce platforms, advertising and online marketing services, and email. The least likely were active directory/credentials, and file and print management. The areas set to show the largest increases in adoption are CRM, data backup/disaster recovery services, and data storage – areas which stand to benefit significantly from being based in the cloud.