Forrester: European cloud adoption accelerates

Research from analyst Forrester has found that over half (56%) of IT decision makers responsible for IT infrastructure have made modernisation a top priority.

The analyst also reported that 87% of European enterprises are using multiple public cloud platforms. These headline figures from the report, The state of cloud in Europe 2022, illustrate that organisations are leaning on cloud-based resources to fuel their innovation, host core business apps, modernise new workloads and increasingly use cloud-native technologies to power their efforts.

Forrester reported that European businesses are reaching a new scale of public cloud usage. The analyst noted that after a slow start, European organisations now recognise cloud for its support of new applications and as affordable compute and storage for existing ones. Its research found that on average, infrastructure decision-makers at European enterprises claim 41% of their total application portfolio is in the public cloud, and 58% anticipate that their firm will migrate over the next two years. Businesses in Europe are implementing a mix of tools such as Kubernetes, cloud-native services, and artificial intelligence and machine learning to rework their applications.

According to Forrester, companies are revising their strategies and taking advantage of cloud-native technologies by default rather than separately from other parts of their cloud plans. This, said the report’s authors, helps them obtain cloud efficiencies, greater scale and unique innovation. The report shows that 22% of European developers regularly use containers on a public cloud for development, with 18% reporting regular usage of serverless.

The report lists a number of examples of public cloud deployments fuelling innovation. For instance, Carrefour has built a recommendation engine with Google Cloud and reduced energy consumption by 45%.

Meanwhile, Lufthansa Technik’s Aviatar platform is being used to help business operations’ scheduling of maintenance to avoid delays and cancellations. The authors of the Forrester report pointed out that the company used a mix of Red Hat products alongside Microsoft Azure, to enable it to accelerate application workflows and collaborate with suppliers more readily.

Adidas is another example highlighted in the report. The sportswear company used Kubernetes to modernise its e-commerce site. In doing so, Forrester said the company cut its website’s load time in half and reduced its release time from four to six weeks to three to four times per day.

The acceleration in adoption is likely to lead to regulatory changes, Forrester warned. The report’s authors pointed out that the EU currently regulates the cloud through non-cloud-specific laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation, but cloud-centric ones are on the horizon.

“The EU announced in 2020 it will issue a law which would empower financial regulators to scrutinise the use of cloud and issue ‘mandatory instructions’,” it noted.

The EU has also introduced the European Alliance on Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud. According to Forrester, this aims to rally joint investment in cross-country data services, develop an EU Cloud Rulebook, and establish a cloud services marketplace.

In a blog post discussing the findings, senior Forrester analyst Jeffery Rajamani wrote: “In 2022, enterprises are revisiting their plans to optimise across cost, data, resilience, networking architectures and regulatory requirements. European enterprises are asking their teams key questions: What are our vulnerabilities if a cloud service goes down? Also, how can I tap into industry-specific cloud services?”