The European market for cloud services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is set to grow about 17% per year over the next three years: from 18.9 to 30.1 billion euros. The strongest increase will be for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is predicted to grow from 7.6 to 11.6 billion euros according to the 2015 Europe SMB Cloud Insights Report.
The authors view the legal requirements for the healthcare, finance and insurance sectors, who are being forced to extend their security and back-up solutions, as one cause for this. Accompanying this is an increasing demand from the IT and technology sectors as well as from science.
The second strongest growing area in Europe is anticipated to include the offerings for Software as a Service (SaaS), which should grow by an average of 21% yearly over the coming three years and achieve a volume of 7.5 billion euros in 2018. In 3rd and 4th place are unified communications, with an estimated volume of 6.3 billion euros, and webhosting services, with 4.7 billion euros.
The report for this year forecasts that 38% of all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will implement an IaaS solution by 2018; 25% of businesses use an SaaS option, 21% access hosted unified communications, and 16% fall back on webhosting services. (Source: Odin/rf)