Europe less conservative than US for Cloud adoption

Avere Systems has released the European findings of its ongoing original study into cloud adoption conducted at the recent Cloud Expo Europe 2014 in February.
Like their US counterparts at the AWS Summit in Vegas last November, the majority of the attendees in London surveyed indicated that they currently use or plan to use cloud within the next two to five years for compute (71%), storage (76%), with application purposes (80%).

Cost savings and disaster recovery were found to be the factors most heavily driving cloud storage adoption across both sides of the Atlantic. One major difference in response was that 53% of US respondents cited organizational resistance as a major barrier to cloud use compared to just 11% in EMEA indicating a potentially less conservative approach in the region.

Attitudes towards the benefits of cloud storage between the US and EMEA were similar with over 60% of those surveyed saying that the main benefits of cloud storage were cost savings and disaster/business continuity. Reaffirming that organizations believe cloud storage has the potential to increase efficiency, productivity and the bottom line for their business.

Europeans were more concerned with potential data loss (24%) and cost (23%) than the US respondents. These concerns differ from the US respondents who did not indicate a high concern regarding potential data loss (15%) and cost (12%).

"It is clear that many of the benefits offered by Cloud are understood across these two geographies however the big disparity between organizational resistance suggests that European users may actually be more open to adopting cloud than their US counterparts," said Rebecca Thompson, vice president of marketing, Avere Systems,

"The fear of data loss may in part result from a number of high profile media reports around cloud data being used by US law enforcement and agencies which has led to greater concern from Europe than has been felt in the US."

Thompson urged vendors to commit more resources to education by pointing to the portion of the survey that indicated over a third of participants in both regions are still not receiving the proper education and training from incumbent storage providers to embrace the cloud despite that the majority are or are planning to use the cloud for computer, storage or application purposes.