2014: The Year the Tidal Wave of Cloud Hits the UK

The fast-paced nature of the tech industry makes predicting what the year ahead holds a difficult task. As IT decision makers, we’re constantly asking, “What will be the next must-have mobile device, and how will we integrate it into our system? Who will create the next key enterprise app, and how will we give our employees secure access to it?” With the industry constantly innovating, we know one thing for certain – cloud and mobile adoption is only going to increase as we use IT to drive value for businesses.

So what does that mean for the IT industry in the UK?

To find out more about how they plan to optimize their businesses’ IT in this changing landscape, we asked UK IT decision makers what they thought about maintaining security and control in an increasingly cloud landscape. The resulting study gave us a few key insights into the ongoing concerns which IT managers have and the challenges they are experiencing, including:

• Nearly 80 percent of UK IT decision makers plan to increase the number of cloud applications in their company this year. With that in mind, I would be surprised if we if we don’t see more than 25 percent of core applications in the cloud by the end of 2014.
• With a move to the cloud inevitable, it’s only natural that security barriers around cloud adoption will be lowered. The last 12 months saw many businesses shy away from moving to the cloud because of security concerns. However, resisting the cloud is no longer a viable option if businesses want to continue to remain competitive. As a result, we are likely to see more organizations acknowledge that data can and should be considered more secure in the cloud than a lot of the costly on-premise infrastructures.
• As cloud adoption increases and security barriers lower, we can also expect to see the emergence of global virtual cloud directories. Rather than deal with multiple vendors, companies will want to deal with one service provider for all their cloud services, so we will see the introduction of cloud aggregators, consolidators or service providers. Similarly, businesses will give up trying to control multiple devices and instead allow employees to bring any device they wish, instead focusing on managing access and identity.

2014 is going to be a year of significant change for UK businesses. The tidal wave of cloud will hit this year and businesses need security and management services to provide companies with a central place to control and access all of their applications to ride out this wave – and we’re excited to continue our growth in the UK to help enable businesses to do so.

To see the full report or to get more insight into challenges facing UK IT leaders and how solutions like Okta can help them optimize their IT and drive value for business, please visit: http://www.okta.com/resources/identity-management-uk-report.html