Cloud adoption rates are climbing rapidly around the world. However, the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) market appears to be growing fastest, according to a recent report from Bitglass.
Indeed, 84 percent of EMEA organizations are migrating to cloud services and related apps, according to the second EMEA Cloud Adoption Report. Roughly 65 percent of EMEA organizations now run Microsoft Office 365 -- up from 51 percent in 2016. In stark contrast, Google G Suite adoption stands at 19 percent in EMEA -- though G Suite adoption figures are higher in France (30 percent) and Spain (40 percent) the report states.
Perhaps Microsoft's SaaS in EMEA lead involves Google's "trust" challenges across EU countries. Business leaders and consumers are keenly aware that the EU is suing Google for pushing its apps on Android users.
IaaS: In the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud market, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 21.8 percent market share in EMEA. Key adopters include government organizations (41.6 percent adoption), while utilities tend to be laggards (5.3 percent adoption). Also of note: Finance and healthcare cloud adoption rates have doubled since 2016 in EMEA.
Cloud Services Adoption and Security
Although adoption rates continue to soar across the board, inconsistent security practices remains an issue. Many customers "assume" security is built into various cloud services, and those customers often fail to implement an overarching security strategy that blankets all of their different apps and services. The evidence: Less than 50 percent of the organizations have deployed even the most basic cloud security tool – SSO (Single Sign-On).
It seems to me this is more of an education issue than anything else. If businesses understood the full security risks associated with these cloud platforms, I would have to believe they would rapidly implement solutions to resolve them. MSPs need to be clear about all that is needed when they help organizations with digital transformations, otherwise there could be a lot more headline making security breaches in the near future.