IT landscapes continue to shift towards the cloud

82% of companies in Germany with more than 20 employees use computing power from the cloud. This means that the score for the Corona year 2020 is 6% higher than in 2019. These figures were determined by the Cloud Monitor 2021, which is based on a representative survey conducted by Bitkom Research on behalf of KPMG. Only 3% of companies state that the use of cloud solutions is not an option for them.

More private cloud than public cloud

The study defines cloud computing as the on-demand use of IT services – software, storage space, computing power – via data networks. It makes no difference whether the services are obtained via a company’s own intranet (private cloud) or the public internet (public cloud). While almost two-thirds of companies rely on applications from the private cloud (2019: 58%), 46% have public cloud solutions in use (2019: 38%).

For the future, companies expect a further expansion of cloud computing. They expect to run around half of their applications (52%) in the cloud in 2025. Large companies with 2,000 or more employees in particular are driving the transformation and are pursuing the goal of sourcing almost three quarters of all applications from the cloud by 2025. For 31% of enterprises and 52% of large enterprises, cloud solutions are prioritized over on-premise applications as part of a cloud-first strategy.

Business-critical factor

Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly decisive factor for business success. 88% regard cloud deployment as an important contribution to digitization in the company as a whole – an increase of 11% on the previous year. In addition, for just under half of those surveyed, it is clear that cloud computing is making a significant contribution to the development of new business models. The Corona pandemic at the latest has shown that the cloud is a core technology of digitization.

Criteria for the choice of provider

When it comes to selecting a cloud service provider, companies place particular emphasis on the performance and stability of the systems (89%) and on the provider’s security and compliance (86%). For 75%, it is relevant that the data centers are located in the jurisdiction of the European Union. When asked about the applications sourced from the public cloud, office and collaboration tools were named most frequently (41%), followed by e-commerce solutions (38%), ERP systems (40%), CRM applications (37%) and HR software (28%).

Legal situation as a possible stumbling block

Fear of unauthorized access to sensitive company data (75%) is the dominant reason why companies refrain from using public cloud solutions. Lack of clarity regarding the legal situation plays a role for 67%. 60% of companies that do not use a public cloud cite legal and regulatory conditions as well as fears of data loss. A lack of cost transparency and predictability is a complaint of 41%.

Legal requirements can make it difficult for companies to implement public cloud scenarios. In the Cloud Monitor 2021, 53% of companies using public cloud solutions report that they have encountered difficulties with regard to the implementation of their compliance requirements when integrating them into the existing IT infrastructure.