UK employees say pandemic made cloud essential but businesses must maximise potential

New research conducted by NetApp has found that the vast majority (86%) of employees feel the cloud has become essential to their business. The Covid-19 pandemic caused a sharp rise in cloud adoption, with Gartner reporting a 23.1% YoY increase in worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services, which will see global cloud spend rise to $332.3 billion.

Employees view convenience as king when it comes to the benefits cloud services bring to their organisation. 87% believe storing data in the cloud is easier than other storage methods. Despite this, almost one in two employees (47%) said they are not using all of the cloud services at their disposal, while 74% do not believe their business is maximising the opportunities that cloud services can offer.

“NetApp is committed to helping UK businesses accelerate cloud adoption and be more data-driven in their outlook to doing business. This research shows that businesses see the value in cloud, but that they are only scratching the surface of how it can transform their organisation,” commented Matt Watts, Chief Technology Evangelist NetApp. “We also want to see businesses using the cloud in a way that is truly sustainable, reducing the digital wastage caused by paying for services they do not use or are failing to maximise the potential of.”

NetApp’s own data suggests that businesses using cloud could reduce their digital wastage by up to 60%, freeing up IT budget to invest in using cloud services to automate manual processes and harness the power of their organisational data in their strategic decision-making. The new survey found that almost a quarter (22%) of employees currently believe that cost is the biggest factor their business considers when choosing cloud services but think that businesses should be focusing on using the cloud to create a more data-driven and sustainable business.

“At NetApp, we found that we were paying 73% too much for the cloud services we were currently using. By implementing SPOT, our cloud optimisation tool, we were able to reduce this digital wastage and start investing in technologies such as AI and data analytics which had a genuine business impact,” added Watts. “Businesses across the UK must ensure that they are maximising the ROI of their cloud services, as this will enable them to accelerate the use of cloud-based technologies like software-as-a-service, data analytics and automation, which take the management of data off their hands, giving them the time and the tools to use data more strategically.”