IDC: EMEA public sector cloud adoption still slow

Less than half of public sector organisations questioned by market watcher have assigned any budget to cloud computing

Less than half of public sector organisations in EMEA have budget specifically assigned to cloud computing, IDC research has revealed.

And none of the respondents to a recent IDC Government Insights report have more than 15 per cent of budget allocated to the cloud.

According to IDC, the survey shows that the opportunity for public sector organisations to capitalise on the benefits of the cloud is clear, but their unease with walking into the unknown is equally evident.

However, results revealed that 29 per cent of respondents agree that improving service levels and business agility as well as ease of deployment to end users would be the two main reasons for government organisations in Western Europe to adopt public cloud.

According to the figures, some 46 per cent of respondents are also concerned about security and are holding back cloud adoption, while 36.3 per cent agree that current laws/regulations hinder the use of cloud computing by their government agency or department. More than 50 per cent of respondents agree that use of cloud services would reduce the volume of data stored on laptops and other personal devices, reducing the potential for data loss.

For public cloud services, IT management was ranked as the most suitable function followed by data backup, archive services and application development and testing. However, data backup, archive services and server or storage capacity on demand were considered the most suitable functions for private cloud services.

Jan Duffy, EMEA research director at Government Insights, said: “Western European government respondents are very conservative. Although there is some commitment to cloud, it is telling that in almost all instances, more than 75 per cent of respondents said they had not deployed and were not planning to deploy cloud for any solution in the next 12 months.

“It should be said that across the other regions, such as Central and Eastern Europe and Asia/Pacific, government respondents were equally conservative. There seems to be little doubt that despite the rhetoric, the private sector continues to lead the way in take-up of cloud services. Given the expectations of many that cloud computing will play a major role in government computing, it is a big surprise that the increases expected in cloud budgets over the next three years are so small.”