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There is a lot of hype about cloud solutions and I am considering whether to develop a piece of software to be sold in the Enterprise Segment as a cloud solution or as a regular software solution with a dedicated server in-house at the companies. My question is whether any of you know of any statistics regarding the percentage of companies that are allowed to utilize cloud solutions at all, due to internal policies about where data should be stored. At least in Denmark, all the companies with more than 1000 employees that I have come across, have policies against using any cloud solutions.

Update: I created a bounty for this question, because I am still missing answers referring to any statistics.

Update2: I am interested in global statistics or for Europe only.

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Which country/legal jurisdiction are you hoping for your customers to be in (EU/US/etc)? – Sid Dec 29 '11 at 8:02
I am interested in global statistics or for Europe only. – David Dec 31 '11 at 11:29

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

European companies? 100% - though many don't know it.

Reason: LEGAL. See, there are data protection laws in the US. A cloud provider operated by an ameircan company, complaying with US court oders in full violation of european laws = illegal to store sensitive data there ;) That covers all major providers.

EU has strict laws, and any company not run by idiots (and many small ones are run by idiot, from alegal sense) will complay to them.

http://www.thomashelbing.com/en/analysis-data-protection-authority-use-non-eu-cloud-might-violate-german-data-protection-law

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/cloud-vision/2011/09/cloud-computing-and-eu-data-protection-law/index.htm

http://www.cloudlegal.ccls.qmul.ac.uk/Research/researchpapers/55648.html

http://www.keymanagementinsights.com/2011/10/eu-data-protection-reform-how-will-it-affect-the-cloud.html

http://www.isaca.org/Groups/Professional-English/cloud-computing/GroupDocuments/DLA_Cloud%20computing%20legal%20issues.pdf

In this scenario basically a non EU provider or a provider ownwed by non EU companies is out of the question, literally.

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up vote 1 down vote
+50

I don't know the stats but I know that it's becoming more and more acceptable in the enterprise. One of our Fortune 500 clients just agreed to allow us to host data on Amazon S3 & CDN's which I think is a first for their organization.

I think there are still plenty of companies that design software to be installed in the enterprise but also have a hosted solution.

VersionOne Project Management & Fogbugz pm/ticketing both have hosted and installable versions. If you haven't started building it yet you can design it to be both... Design it to be a hosted / cloud solution then if you do get one of those mammoth companies who want it just charge them appropriately to have you tweak it to work hosted in their world.

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Thank you for your answer. If it is only less than 5% of companies that allow cloud solutions, then we could save all the money creating it, and wait another 5 years for it to become acceptable. I believe that US companies are more liberal with regards to this than European ones, but I would like to see statistics before concluding. – David Dec 18 '11 at 2:41
up vote 1 down vote

Europe does not have a 100 percent policy against cloud computing. Otherwise you wouldn't have data centers in Europe. That's absurd. For example, cineca hosts a huge data center for Italian universities.

Were cloud computing voted against 100%, you wouldn't have events about it like http://cloudexpo-europe.com/ last year. Google wouldn't be opening a building in london soon http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393840,00.asp. I mean, even Rackspace has offices in the UK, and european union looks forward for more cloud based developing: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/daa11/item-display.cfm?id=5999

There are issues about the privacy of personal information. but as long as you are aware of them you should have no problem. If you do things properly, this doesn't have any impact in your company. It's a pain, but in no way it conflicts with cloud based services. You only have to do things right. Information about how to complain to the privacy law is easy to find.

Cheers.

PD: For some reason, I could't post this as a comment. Sorry.

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Sadly it ignores facts like being US based you re aopen to US court orders even for european custoemrs which makesp utting european data to us parented companies illegal. Ouch. – NetTecture Dec 19 '11 at 15:45
@NetTecture I know that Microsoft recently solved this in Denmark by getting someone to run a hosting center, while Microsoft delivers the software. – David Dec 19 '11 at 15:57
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is this a US-only website? serious question. I keep reading questions -and answers- that refer only to the US. Stack Exchange may be based in the US, but the internet -and Stack Exchange readers- are world wide. Maybe the tittle of this QA should be StartUps on the US.... you can do bussiness in Europe related to cloud computing. Period. Otherwise, the big players would not be doing it. That's a fact. – jbcolmenares Dec 19 '11 at 15:58
up vote 0 down vote

Cloud companies like Amazon Webservices are becoming HIPAA compliant and adhering to other various compliant standards. All competitors are following suite. The cloud computing model is definitely where things are headed. The kinks are being addressed and ironed out as time passes. Cloud is the future technology and these big data centers are going to win out on economy of scale as a basic business concept. You should build for the future and make it easy to snap your solution in to these cloud frameworks to ensure your success.

reference Amazon Security Compliance

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