Removing barriers to cloud computing in Europe through policy action could generate about €250bn EU GDP Growth in 2020, according to a new IDC study.
The study found that policy actions intended at removing barriers to adoption of cloud services will increase the value of spending on public cloud services to €77.7bn by 2020.
IDC EMEA associate vice president of European Government Consulting Gabriella Cattaneo, commenting on the findings, said: "The migration to a new IT paradigm enabling greater innovation and productivity – the roll out of cloud computing – will generate substantial direct and indirect impacts on economic and employment growth in the EU."
If the EU adopts a ‘no intervention’ policy towards cloud adoption, cloud could generate about €88bn of contribution to the EU GDP in 2020, according to the model developed by the research organisation.
The €250bn EU GDP growth corresponds to an increase of €162bn over the ‘no intervention’ scenario in 2020.
IDC research vice president of European Industry Solutions Giuliana Folco, commenting on the report, said: "We estimate that the cumulative impact for the period 2015-2020 will be €940bn in the "policy-driven" scenario, compared to €357bn in the "no intervention" one."
According to IDC, the major hurdles to wider adoption or increased intensity of usage of cloud computing could be uncertainty about legal jurisdiction and location of one’s data in the cloud, worry about the level of security guaranteed in the cloud and difficulty to assess the trustworthiness of suppliers.
In September 2012, a cloud computing strategy released by the European Union (EU) found that the IT cloud computing is expected to increase economic growth all through Europe and could deliver 2.5 million new jobs.
