An Englishman’s home is his server

Are other European nations more relaxed about cloud services? Why not have a siesta and think about it...

Every day I read a new article about cloud computing, most recently claiming that cloud take up is set to surge this year. Gartner estimates that worldwide cloud services revenue will increase from £28.7bn in 2008, to £93bn in 2013.    Reading BBC coverage of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) report this week, it got me thinking about the role cloud computing can potentially play in helping pull us out of recession. 

According to the report, the UK economy has officially emerged from the recession, although figures showed a weaker-than-expected 0.1 percent growth. Interestingly it stated that the UK economy had been the last major economy still in recession, when France and Germany came out of recession last summer, with Japan and the US also emerging last year.

With the benefit of having just completed some EMEA research into take up of hosted services for a client, I thought it would be interesting to look into some of the cultural variations and compare these with the recession data. Clearly just my speculation, but it’s certainly a worthwhile thought that the way we deploy technology may have a real affect on the state of the wider economy. Here are some thoughts:

The research suggested that overall take up of cloud services was fairly consistent across the UK, France and Germany – mainly down to the high level of hosted websites in the UK.  However, drilling down into the details, it became clear that France and Germany have a much higher take up of hosted email, servers, backup, ecommerce, collaboration, web conferencing and CRM.

This suggests that more French and German businesses have been open to adapting their business models in a bid to cut costs in the recession. Could this also imply that these businesses have done better, thus helping to pull their economies out of recession more quickly?

Results also highlighted that the UK is slower to move to cloud services because we are far more worried about the security aspect, as well as the need to own all parts of a business.  To me, this seems to ring true in other areas of life, not just technology and the workplace.  There is that age old UK ‘island mentality’ that we must keep control of our data, property, currency, traditions and so on, in contrast to the more liberal nations of France, Germany or Spain that seem happier to merge and outsource areas of life to other people.

 It would be interesting to find statistics comparing levels of rented property or cars across these cultures – to see if there is any correlation with technology adoption and any weight behind my theories!