UK spending on cloud computing services will double within the next two years to over £1.2 billion, one IT industry analyst has claimed.
According to TechMarketView, the cloud will become of increasing prominence between now and 2012 as more organisations consider the value of outsourcing IT assets to third-party vendors, which include the likes of Amazon Web Services and Google Apps.
"In the old days, big companies used to generate their own electricity. But they do not do that any more", TechMarketView senior analyst Philip Carnelley told BBC News. "Software is going the same way – let others do the processing. Carnelley added that he and other industry analysts were not "hyping up" the cloud, but that a "genuine shift" was taking place in the UK.
TechMarketView claims that cloud computing-based services currently account for about 7.5% of the UK’s total software market.
The biggest obstacle to organisations adopting cloud computing has so far been risks surrounding information security, as confirmed in a recent survey published by IBM, which showed that 80% of CIOs reported security as their chief concern when moving into the cloud.
