A study by Bitglass has revealed cloud adoption is accelerating rapidly, with almost 85% of businesses switching to cloud-based apps and services including Office 365, AWS, G Suite, and Slack.
The cloud access security broker (CASB) revealed that Office365 has seen the biggest gains since 2016, with adoption rates up more than 50% compared to Bitglass's 2016 report. 65% of organisations are using Microsoft's cloud productivity suite compared to just 19% of businesses using Google's G Suite alternative.
Businesses making the most use of Microsoft's cloud-based productivity suite are finance and healthcare, where adoption rates have more than doubled over the last few years.
AWS is more widely used in EMEA than in the rest of the world. 21.8% of businesses are using Amazon's cloud offshoot in the region compared to 8% worldwide.
Overall, the EMEA area is very receptive to cloud technologies and governmental organisations are leading the way, it would seem, with a 41.6% adoption rate. Overall the number of businesses using the cloud has increased by 27% in the last to years, although Bitglass highlighted security is still a big problem in the region.
It discovered that less than half (47%) of businesses have enabled a single sign-on (SSO) tool. But this varies greatly by sector, with education, biotech, healthcare and finance the most security-conscious industries.
“The results of this survey reinforce what we found in our 2016 study – organisations in EMEA are embracing cloud productivity apps but still lack the security tools necessary to protect data," Rich Campagna, CMO at Bitglass said.
"In cloud-first environments, security must evolve to protect data on many more endpoints and in many more applications.”
