NSA scandal tarnishes UK cloud industry

One in 10 businesses have changed cloud providers in the wake of the snooping revelations

One in 10 UK businesses has switched cloud provider since the NSA scandal last summer, according to new research, which claims the revelations have prompted almost half of organisations to change the way they use cloud.

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) questioned 250 senior business and IT decision makers as part of its research, which found security is the number-one reason holding companies back from moving certain applications to the cloud.

Data privacy and data sovereignty were the second and third-most-important issues on the minds of those surveyed, but the CIF claimed not all their worries were necessary.

It insisted its research found that only two per cent of those organisations asked had actually experienced a cloud-related security breach.

CIF's chief executive Alex Hinton said this should prove that the cloud's reputation of being less secure is not always justified.

"Businesses are right to be concerned about their data, but this applies as much to cloud environments as to on-premise," he said.

"This is arguably driven by the continued fear, uncertainty and doubt being peddled in the media following recent... revelations about PRISM."