Only about one in five German citizens (21 per cent) use cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, to save documents, photos or videos on the Web. That’s the figure reported by the BITKOM Industry Association, citing data from the European statistics agency Eurostat. The most cloud-friendly country in Europe is Denmark, where 44 percent of citizens use cloud services. This is followed by Norway (43 percent), Iceland (39 percent) and the UK (38 percent). The European average is 22 percent.
One of the main reasons for the lack of acceptance is worry over data security and data protection: 21 per cent of Germans state such concerns as the reason for avoiding the cloud. The statisticians have discovered higher figures only in Switzerland (22 per cent), the Netherlands (25 per cent) and Luxembourg (25 per cent). However, the use of cloud services is still significantly more widespread in those three countries than it is in Germany: 34 per cent in Switzerland and the Netherlands and 35 per cent in Luxembourg.