Brexit could cause infrastructure confusion - Gartner

Cloud infrastructure sales grew 37.4 per cent in Q2 this year but Brexit could cause regulation 'mismatch'

EMEA cloud infrastructure revenue spending increased 37.4 per cent in Q2 against a backdrop of Brexit uncertainty, according to market watcher IDC.

The year-on-year increase saw EMEA revenue hit $1.4m (£1.1m) and IDC is predicting the market will reach $10.5bn by 2020, 36.5 per cent of the market, spurred on by new cloud-dependent technology.

IDC research director Kamil Gregor said that, while the EU referendum did not have a significant impact on spending, uncertainty regarding regulation could have an effect at a later date.

"In the first proper post-Brexit quarter, we still see no justification for significant adjustments of our cloud forecast in the region," said Gregor.

"Cloud infrastructure vendors reported a brief disruption of their operations immediately after the referendum, but since then, business seems to have continued as usual. Enterprises may re-evaluate where their cloud data is located if Brexit causes a mismatch of regulatory rules in the UK and the rest of the region in the long-term future."

Gregor explained that differing regulations across Europe have been a "major driver" in multi-cloud adoption and IDC now expects over 70 per cent of western European enterprises to adopt multi-cloud in some form by the end of 2017.

"[Regulatory differences] will be at least partially removed by the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which enters into effect in May 2018, although we do not expect this to significantly slow multi-cloud adoption in western Europe," Gregor added.

Some $5.1bn was pumped into traditional IT infrastructure spending in Q2, accounting for 78 per cent of the total market. This was however down 9.9 per cent year on year.