Bitglass study finds that EMEA cloud adoption continues to outpace rest of the world

Published : 6 years ago, on 24/08/2018

• EMEA cloud adoption has increased to 84 percent; 5 in 6 companies analysed have deployed at least one cloud application
• Office 365 continues its domination over G Suite
• Financial services and healthcare see surge in cloud adoption rates
• Many organisations fail to deploy adequate cloud security

Bitglass,the Next-Gen CASB company, today released its second EMEA Cloud Adoption Report, which reveals rates of cloud adoption and deployment of security tools across Europe.

The findings show that EMEA cloud adoption continues to outpace the rest of the world, with 84 percent of EMEA organisations migrating to apps like Office 365, AWS, G Suite, and Slack to leverage the productivity and cost benefits of the public cloud. The results found that EMEA cloud adoption rates have increased by 27 percent since the initial study in 2016.

Office 365 is the most widely adopted cloud application across EMEA. 65 percent of organisations now use this application – an increase of 51 percent compared to Bitglass’ 2016 study. Usage of AWS far exceeds the rate of AWS deployments globally. Worldwide only 8 percent use AWS while in EMEA that figure rises to 21.8 percent.

The report also finds that many EMEA organisations lack even the most basic security tools. Only 47 percent of organisations analysed had a single sign-on (SSO) tool in use, for example.

Rich Campagna, CMO at Bitglass said: “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. In cloud-first environments, security must evolve to protect data on many more end points and in many more applications.”

Key findings:

Office365 adoption continues to grow. More than three times as many organisations now use Office 365 (65 percent) as use G Suite (19 percent). Office 365 adoption in EMEA has grown by over 50 percent in the last two years.

Despite falling usage numbers overall, G Suite remains popular in France (30 percent adoption) and Spain (40 percent).

AWS usage in EMEA exceeds the rate of AWS usage globally. 21.8 percent of EMEA organisations now use AWS, compared to just 8 percent worldwide.

Government organisations lead the way from a vertical industry perspective with a 41.6 percent adoption rate. Utilities trailed with just 5.3 percent adoption.

Regulated industries including finance and healthcare saw significant gains in cloud adoption rates. Within finance and healthcare, use of Office 365 has nearly doubled since 2016.

Less than 50 percent of organisations have deployed even the most basic cloud security tool – SSO.  Only 47 percent of organisations sampled had a single sign-on tool in use.

SSO is most widely adopted in education (64 percent), biotech (54 percent) healthcare (53.7 percent) and finance (53.5 percent)