Europe is playing catch-up with the US on cloud adoption, research suggests

Lack of investment and a continued over-reliance on legacy technologies mean European enterprises are falling behind their global counterparts when it comes to using cloud, research suggests.

According to O’Reilly Media’s Evolving data infrastructure report,cloud adoption by European enterprises is occurring at a slower pace compared to businesses operating in other parts of the world, particularly the US.

This is based on the responses the firm received to a survey it ran in October 2018, where it polled more than 3,200 organisations across the globe about the maturity of their cloud adoption plans.

Out of the respondents, 900 came from Western Europe, with just under a quarter (24%) saying they considered their organisations to be “sophisticated cloud users”, on the basis they have been using cloud-based infrastructure in production for more than four years.

This suggests Europe is behind the rest of the world from cloud maturity perceptive, given – from a global perspective – the percentage of respondents who consider their organisations to be sophisticated cloud users stands at 26%.

A further 44% of Western Europe respondents said they identified as “early adopters”, given they have been using cloud-based infrastructure in production for one-to-three years, while the remaining 32% said they are still exploring what role the technology will play within their wider infrastructure strategies.

The percentage of the 1,400 North American respondents who identified as being in the early adopter stage of their cloud migration journeys is the same as in Western Europe, but this geographic group also has a higher percentage of sophisticated cloud users (30%) overall.

In terms of which cloud providers they are using, the research suggests respondents are favouring a multi-cloud approach, with many of the organisations questioned stating they source public cloud services from more than one provider.

For example, out of the 63% of respondents who said they host data in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, less than a third (29%) said they did so to the exclusion of Microsoft Azure or the Google Cloud Platform. Meanwhile, 8% of respondents said they mix and match services from all three providers.