77 per cent of UK organisations use little or no cloud, Computing Research indicates

But 75 per cent say their use of cloud will increase in the next 12 months

Over three quarters of UK organisations only make limited use of cloud - if at all - a new report from Computing Research has found. However, 75 per cent of respondents to the survey say they will be become heavier cloud users within 12 months.

Asked "Are you using cloud computing services?", 54 per cent of organisations replied that they use cloud "to a lesser extent", with just 23 saying "a great extent". Ten per cent are "trialling" cloud, while 13 per cent are not using cloud at all.

This means 77 per cent of UK organisations are either not using the cloud at all, or are not even close to relying on the technology.

Among the respondents who said they used cloud a lot was a development lead at a media organisation, who described a set-up that's "mostly AWS with some Azure".

"It's largely micro-service based architectures, high volumes, maybe 15,000 transactions a second, that sort of thing," which the firm is using to "generate recommendations, notifications and doing big data analytics on that for targeted communications".

Some organisations cited cost as the reason for holding back, with one head of IT for local government remarking that "moving to a cloud and a pay as you go model increases [the department's] running costs".

"So for us it's partly the age of the hardware - rather than replace it, we'll go to the cloud, but we may delay taking on that additional running cost by another year or two ..."

Nevertheless, 75 per cent of organisations surveyed said their use of cloud will increase within the next 12 months, with only 18 per cent believing things will stay the same. Two per cent believe they'll use less cloud in future, while five per cent "don't know". The research also found that 42 per cent of those surveyed believe that "cloud first" will be the natural order of things by 2019.

To hear more results from this research, come to the ComputingCloud and Infrasture Summit 2016 on 22 September. This free, all-day event is being held at a venue next to London's Fenchurch Street Station, and you can expect to hear from a variety of industry peers and experts. Lunch is provided.