In Europe, Cloud Is the New Default

By Salim Hafid, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Bitglass

If you keep up with the blog, you'll remember our 2018 global cloud adoption report, wherein thousands of organizations deployed cloud apps since we last conducted our automated analysis of over 100,000 firms. Many in EMEA wanted to know how Europe stacked up against the rest of the world, against the US, and whether companies in region were securing their cloud environments.

EMEA leading the cloud charge

Europe has always been ahead of the curve with respect to cloud usage. Cost and compliance concerns have driven IT in every organization to migrate and enable employee mobility. Of note, the research team's analysis found that the rate of cloud adoption in EMEA outpaced US and global adoption, topping 84 percent this year and led by major SaaS productivity apps like Office 365 – used in 65 percent of firms in EMEA today.

Microsoft’s continued investment in their SaaS suite has pushed Office 365 deployments into far more organizations than Google with G Suite. More than three times as many organizations in EMEA now use Office 365 than use G Suite.

Many companies in Europe still haven't secured data in the cloud

A majority of organizations in EMEA still don’t have single sign-on in place. Only 47 percent of organizations in our sample had some SSO tool. What's more, few have taken steps to secure the growing number of Shadow IT applications in use. In almost every EMEA-based organization in our sample, the Bitglass team found more than one cloud app deployed. Most companies have some productivity app in use, a cloud messaging platform, an enterprise file sync and share tool, and IaaS workloads in AWS or Azure.

Our data revealed that a majority of organizations have deployed Office 365 or G Suite in addition to Slack. In the technology sector, for example, 3 in 4 organizations have tried Slack and nearly all have some cloud productivity app deployed.

Check out our full report, we explore the underlying trends driving organizations to the cloud and compare the growth of cloud in Europe to the rest of the world.