Poor broadband hindering UK's ability to cash in on cloud

According to a report from the CEBR, France, Germany, Italy and Spain will benefit more from the cloud than Britain

Of the five biggest European economies, the UK is expected to benefit least from the cloud because it doesn't yet have an adequate broadband infrastructure.

Research released by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) on behalf of EMC, entitled 'The Cloud Dividend Report', argues that although the cloud will benefit the UK economy by £26bn between now and 2015, its share of the cloud market will be smaller than that of France, Germany, Italy and Spain. However, this could be reversed if the government delivers on its promise to increase superfast broadband access to every part of the UK.

The total revenue generated by the cloud is forecast to be €177.3bn (£149.4bn) by 2015. The research also argues that cloud technologies could create 2,396,200 jobs across EMEA and 289,000 in the UK by 2015.

The research focuses on three common computing models today: public, private and hybrid clouds. It argues that hybrid cloud adoption is the main driver of the UK's cloud dividend, accounting for 44 per cent of the total benefit derived from the technology. Purely private cloud adoption accounts for 33 per cent, while public cloud accounts for 23 per cent.

The private cloud currently accounts for 46.8 per cent of the cost savings element of the UK's cloud dividend, but this will fall to 43.9 per cent by the year 2015.