Published on the 20/07/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has taken a very sharp pin to the hyperbole regarding cloud deployment by enterprise Australia…

Official government statistics reveal that just 19 per cent of Australian businesses with an internet connection currently use any form of cloud computing services.

Those that do use cloud tend toward Software or Storage as a Service rather than using platform or infrastructure as a service. The ABS report is admittedly reliant on statistics gathered from businesses in 2013/14, but it still provides an interesting snapshot of cloud demand in Australia.

Not surprisingly businesses in the IT, media and communications sectors are most enthusiastic about cloud computing with a 43 percent penetration rate. Next in line are finance and insurance, then professional, scientific and technical services.

According to the ABS businesses with 5-19 employees were the most likely users of SaaS (92 percent of cloud users in this bracket used SaaS). Meanwhile infrastructure as a service was used by just 29 percent of large businesses – the highest penetration achieved.

In terms of benefits small businesses were most likely to report improved productivity, mid-sized businesses enthused about the simplicity of deployment, while it was enterprise scale users of cloud that said they had seen a reduction in costs (noted by 50 percent of big business cloud users).

Indeed the cost of cloud computing was cited by a significant number of businesses as the reason that they hadn’t taken the plunge.

Asked for other reasons why they didn’t use cloud computing, most businesses cited insufficient knowledge.

The bogeyman of data sovereignty being a barrier to adoption was revealed as just that for most businesses although the larger the business the more concerned it seems about where data is stored. Location of data was an issue for 9.5 percent of small businesses, 19.2 percent of large enterprises.

Instead one of the bigger barriers that cloud vendors will have to overcome is the perception of security in the cloud. Fourteen percent of small businesses were concerned about cloud security, but it was a much bigger issue for enterprise customers with 30.4 percent of companies with 200 plus employees citing security as a barrier to cloud adoption.