The SMB cloud services market will grow 17% in the next three years as businesses particularly look at Infrastructure as a Service.
The IaaS market is expected to increase from €7.6bn to €11.6bn in the next three years as healthcare and finance industries increase their investment in security and server backups as a result of regulatory requirements.
According to a report from Odin, the benefits of security, resilience, flexibility and scalability are causing organisations to move to the cloud. Gone it seems are the days when organisations were wary of cloud services ability to provide secure IT environments.
Statistics from the British Chambers of Commerce backup these claims that cloud use is increasing among SME’s.
The BCC found that 91% of companies are utilising cloud technology to have at least one member of staff working from home, and 19% of businesses said that more than half of their workforce is working away from their main office location.
Keith Poyser, Accellion, MD, EMEA, said: "The technology industry is built on a culture of innovation, and an inherent drive to make things more efficient, more useful, and more engaging. Today there is a mobile revolution occurring, transforming the way we work and the tools we use for that work.
"The cloud should be first and foremost utilised to increase productivity, due to the flexibility it provides in how and where employees get their work done.
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"Unlike the early days of flexible working, employees today expect to be able to work wherever, on any device, without the need for VPN to access critical content. Therefore, by providing the right tools to complete work-related tasks from anywhere at any time is a game changer."
The flexibility in the workplace is coming as a direct result of cloud service use, with 69% of businesses using cloud-based applications.
Some perhaps un-thought of benefits that have come from cloud adoption are things like reduced spending on office supplies.
Poyser, said: The scalability of cloud computing solutions means that IT teams should be able to set up programs that are then easily accessed and used by end users without extensive input from the IT team.
"Many companies also report savings on physical office supplies such as paper saved by digital collaboration, or reduced costs of computing hardware as companies shift to a BYOD policy."
Additional factors contributing to flexible working are a strong Internet connection (63%) and smartphones, which are seen as the biggest difference to businesses in the last 12 months (68%).
Odin’s SMB Cloud Insights report findings also showed that the SaaS market will have the biggest CAGR over the next three years, jumping from €4.3bn today to €7.5bn in 2018.
Growth is also expected in unified communication services to €6.3bn and web applications will rise to €4.7bn.
