UK named sixth-biggest consumer of cloud services in EU

The UK is the sixth-biggest consumer of cloud services in the European Union (EU), with adoption way above the average of other member states.

According to the cloud usage data, compiled by the EU’s statistical office Eurostat, 26% of EU companies employing at least 10 people are now using cloud computing in one form or other.

However, the UK is among a handful of European countries where cloud usage exceeds 40%, according to Eurostat’s ICT usage and e-commerce in enterprises poll, which features input from 158,000 companies operating within the 28 EU member states.

Finland has the highest proportion of enterprise cloud users (65%), followed by Sweden (57%), Denmark (56%), the Netherlands (48.2%), Ireland (45.2%) and the UK (41.9%).

At the other end of the scale, the countries with the lowest level of cloud use include Latvia (14.5%), Greece (12.8%), Poland (11.5%), Romania (10.3%) and Bulgaria (8.3%).

The average cloud usage rate among EU enterprises stands at 26%, which is up seven percentage points on 2014 adoption levels, according to Eurostat’s figures.

“Compared with 2014, the increase in the use of cloud computing was highest in the information and communication sector (up 19 percentage points), in the professional, scientific and technical sector (up 16 percentage points) followed by the real estate sector (up 13 percentage points),” said Eurostat in a statement.

The survey also revealed that the majority of European enterprise cloud adopters (69%) are using the technology to host email systems and store data (68%), run databases (48%) and house business productivity services (53%).

Enterprises are adopting cloud far more keenly than their SME counterparts, the Eurostat data shows, with the former showing a far more accelerated pace of usage than the latter.

“Over the last four years (2014 to 2018), the highest increase in cloud computing usage was observed in large enterprises (up 21 percentage points), compared with plus 12 percentage points in medium-sized enterprises and plus six percentage points in small enterprises,” said Eurostat.