Majority in the cloud

According to a representative survey conducted by Bitkom Research on behalf of KPMG, 54 percent of companies used cloud computing in 2015. The year before, the figure was only 44 percent. A further 18 percent of respondents were planning or discussing its use last year.

"Cloud computing is a killer application of digitization"

said Axel Pols, Managing Director of Bitkom Research, when presenting the study results.

"Technology creates huge efficiencies, and it's very often the basis of new business models in the digital economy."

According to the survey, the sharp rise in usage is almost exclusively attributable to small and medium-sized enterprises. Cloud usage in companies with 100 to 1999 employees, for example, rose by seven percentage points to 62 percent in 2015, and in companies with 20 to 99 employees by as much as 11 points to 52 percent.

At companies with 2,000 or more employees, usage increased by only one point to 69 percent at a comparatively high level. Pols:

"The midmarket has finally shed its reluctance to embrace cloud computing."

According to the survey, the most widespread public cloud application is office software. 43 percent of the companies surveyed use text systems, spreadsheets or programs for creating presentations via the Internet, for example.

The skeptical attitude of some companies toward public clouds is also not reflected in the experiences of users. On the contrary: 73 percent of companies that use public cloud services have had positive experiences with them.

Despite the strong increase in public cloud usage, security concerns remain the biggest obstacle to more intensive use of the technology. More than half (58 percent) of the companies surveyed fear unauthorized access to sensitive company data and 45 percent fear data loss.