More cloud services are being launched every week and most of these are aimed at the business sector. Organisations have never had more cloud apps to choose from that provide robust levels of security for enterprise data. Cloud adoption in the workplace continued to increase this quarter, albeit at a slower pace than last quarter. Companies and employees both actively use a greater variety of cloud services. AVERAGE NUMBER OF SERVICES The average European organisation now uses 1,038 cloud services, an increase of 33% over the same quarter last year. The lowest number of cloud services in use is 573 (for a 650 person organisation) while the highest is over 6,000. Despite
AVERAGE NUMBER OF SERVICES
The average European organisation now uses 1,038 cloud services, an increase of 33% over the same quarter last year. The lowest number of cloud services in use is 573 (for a 650 person organisation) while the highest is over 6,000. Despite this we still read public statements by some CIOs that “we have no cloud use in our organisation”. Wherever we test a network, we always find hundreds of services being used, even in industries such as defense, government and highly-regulated businesses, sadly there seems to be ignorance of the breadth of enterprise cloud use at some levels in organisations
Cloud services directed at the enterprise market account for 78% of the total cloud services available, while consumer-focused services represent 10% and those with solutions for both make up 12%. Collaboration continues to be the category with the greatest variety of cloud services by a wide margin. In total in Europe, 2254 different collaboration services are in use (e.g. Cisco WebEx, Evernote, etc.). The category with the second-largest number of services is cloud infrastructure (PaaS) with 1,535 different services, before we start moving to SaaS aimed at specific functions (marketing leads with 1,421 services and IT has 1,071 services available). On the one hand, the multiplying number of cloud services that companies use indicates we’re in the early days of the market as new entrants regularly emerge with better capabilities.
However, companies that use many redundant services in each category can actually end up discouraging collaboration and introducing friction as users must login to different apps to work with different teams. The average employee actively uses more than 20 cloud services at work, including 8 collaboration services, 5 file sharing services, and 4 content sharing services (e.g. YouTube, Flickr, etc.). These numbers serve to remind us that using “the cloud” is much more than just cloud storage, where there are currently just under 500 different providers. The cloud market is early in its development, and while there are cloud services that stand out in terms of user count, few categories have a dominant provider. Users are still able to find unique functionality to justify using several cloud services in each category.
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