Who’s using the cloud in your organisation?

01 Aug 2012

Employees are turning to consumer cloud services such as Dropbox in their quest for productivity, but raising questions about data security and control in the process.

The bad news for CIOs is that, ‘under the radar’, staff in their organisation are more than likely using consumer cloud services on company time. The good news is that they’re doing it to get work done and boosting their productivity as a result.

 

That’s one of the conclusions from a recent survey of 323 users at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across North America and EMEA, conducted by Spiceworks, a online IT professional community, and sponsored by information management giant, EMC. In particular, it looked at how three business applications, now readily available as consumer cloud services, are influencing employee productivity: file sharing/storage; email; and productivity suites.

 

Looking at file sharing/storage, the survey found that 33 percent of the IT professionals surveyed say that employees in their organisation are using file-sharing services at the office, with most selecting Dropbox. More than 75 percent highlighted data accessibility as the primary advantage of file-sharing service, but almost the same proportion (73 percent) said that a lack of control and security issues were their single biggest concern with such an approach.

 

The problem of control seems particularly acute in EMEA, where only 12 percent of SMBs have an IT-approved provider for file sharing, compared to 25 percent in North America. “Despite IT concerns, employee demands drive widespread cloud-based file-sharing deployments within SMB environments,” says Spicework’s report.

 

Similarly, on-premise email continues to be preferred by SMBs, but hosted email is gaining ground. More than half (52 percent) of those surveyed have deployed on-premise email, while 42 percent have chosen a hosted environment. An additional six percent plan to migrate to hosted email within the next six months.

 

Microsoft continues to dominate the on-premise email market, but Google holds a commanding lead among cloud-based providers. According to the survey, 34 percent of those with a hosted environment are using Google, while 16 percent have selected Microsoft Office 365. The remaining half have selected another hosted option, including hosted instances of Microsoft Exchange.

 

When it comes to cloud-based productivity suites, SMBs have been slow to adopt, the survey finds. Thirty-five percent of survey participants are currently using or planning to use a cloud-based productivity suite for word processing, spreadsheets and other tasks. However, 64 percent are not currently using or plan to use a cloud-based offering. North American companies are more likely to take this step into the cloud, with 38 percent currently using or planning to adopt in future, compared to 30 percent in EMEA.

“Overall, the findings show that productivity is a powerful lure,” the report says. “Cloud apps are in demand that reduce burdens on internal IT management, while simultaneously enabling access to data and applications wherever and whenever users want. But SMBs struggle to find the best way to implement cloud-based solutions while maintaining their principles around data control and security.”