A survey conducted on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) among 1,666 Luxembourg companies in 2014 has revealed that just over one in ten businesses in the Grand Duchy purchased cloud computing services two years ago.

The results were published on Thursday by STATEC, showing that the 13% of Luxembourg non-financial enterprises with at least 10 people which purchased cloud services was in line with those observed in the country's neighbours of France (12%) and Germany (11%), but lower than in the Netherlands and Ireland, at 28% each. The EU average was determined to be 19%.

Cloud computing is a flexible and distributed use of IT services, made available over the Internet in real time and according to the needs of the company. The service provided to the company is paid with fixed or variable pricing according to the capacity used or the number of users.

Separating the various paid services used, file storage proved to the most widespreas, employed by 61% of companies, followed by the management of e-mail services (46%) and database accommodation (41%). A third of companies used office software via the cloud.

More specific services were found to be purchased less frequently: accounting software (19%), customer management software (18%) and power calculation (14%). Nearly one in ten companies claimed they had did not buy any of the aforementioned services. Low and medium level services concerned email; office applications (such as word processing and spreadsheets); file storage and data hosting. Among the six countries observed, Luxembourg had the highest proportion of 55% for low and medium services whilst high level services were only used by a third of companies in Luxembourg, against 55% and 63% in Belgium and the Netherlands, respectively.

Unsurprisingly, the ICT indsutry was found to be the most dependent sector on the Cloud, with 37% of related companies making use of it. This was followed by 22% of companies operating professional, scientific or technical services, and 10% of those active in the construction and accommodation sector. A trend was equally observed in terms of the size of the company, with one in three businesses with at least 250 people using cloud computing servicesm against a little more than one in ten small companies.

According to the report, insufficient knowledge of cloud computing is preventing it from spreading among businesses, with almost nine out of ten companies surveyed deigning to buy from cloud services, around half of which cited inadequate knowledge thereof as the reason. Using the Cloud requires a certain expertise of the contractual and legal aspects as well as technical implementation details.

For companies in the ICT sector, which are generally better informed on the subjects, this obstacle does not hold much weight and it is instead risks linked to security that prevent cloud promulgation - a barrier also discerned in professional, scientific and technical activities and the transport and storage sector. Uncertainty about the location of data is also a frequently cited barrier, listed second for more than half of the branched in economic activities and first alongside security risks for vehicle trade and repair.

 

Graph by STATEC / EUROSTAT