British businesses are not making most of the cloud, study shows

More UK businesses plan to cash in on cloud benefits

But cloud adoption is set to grow significantly in the UK, across all sectors and in all sizes of business, said the FSB's Finney. 

“Cost benefits are one of the biggest advantages of the cloud. An average SME would spend £2,000 on an on-premise application, and then 20% of that initial investment every year on maintenance. The same service on the cloud costs £18 per month,” said Patel.

Some 73% of SMEs and 70% of large enterprises agreed that cloud is a key factor in the recent boom of entrepreneurs and start-ups in the UK and US, the study found.

Among the benefits of using cloud services, the study found that large enterprises made the biggest savings. Nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) were saving between £500,000 and £4m a year.

IT heads who were present at the roundtable, and who had adopted cloud computing, urged UK businesses to use the cloud. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without having the ability to use the cloud,” said Darren Robertson, data scientist at Action for Children.

Smaller businesses also noted a reduction in IT costs, but of a lower proportion. More than one-fifth said they saved between 25% and 50%, and a further 41% said their savings were between 10% and 25%.

Cloud needs to prove business value in addition to cost savings

More than half of enterprises also said that the cloud had helped them to focus more on strategy and innovation.

“I expected to see more dramatic benefits of cloud services to SMEs than just cost savings,” said Brian Nicholson from Manchester University.

More UK businesses will adopt cloud when they see cloud creating value for users, rather than just cost benefits, because many are of the opinion that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, said Nicholson.

“UK businesses are definitely investing in technology and many are especially investing in the cloud, but they need more use cases to become more confident about the cloud,” said Finney.

But the industry consortiums and service providers have to do more to enable UK businesses to move to the cloud, the experts said.

“In two years, there should be more guidance, advice and reference architecture for small businesses to overcome cloud fears,” said Nicholson.

“The suppliers must make the cloud contract a lot simpler too,” he said.

But cloud contracts may not become simpler in one or two years, warned Nigel Beighton, vice-president of technology at Rackspace.

“This is because legislation does not move at the pace of technological innovation,” he said. “Today’s contracts are based on legislation that are not helpful for cloud adoption. Legislation will change, but it will take time.”

UK businesses will have more confidence in moving to the cloud if the G-Cloud happens successfully, said Action for Children's Robertson. 

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