Dive Brief:
- Cloud security firm Bitglass found a 71% surge in cloud usage across the verticals it evaluated over the last year and a half, CIO reported.
- Government and regulated industries saw the biggest jump, according to the new study.
- Bitglass reported a spike of more than 300% in the proportion of government agencies that have moved to the cloud.
Dive Insight:
The study analyzed data from approximately 130,000 organizations in North America.
Rich Campagna, vice president of products at Bitglass, said the study seems to confirm "the sheer rate at which cloud adoption has taken off in the last year-and-a-half."
Bitglass' analysis evaluated only the use of public cloud applications and limited its analysis to Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365.
Bitglass found 47% of government agencies have adopted either Google Apps or Office 365. While a few larger agencies have made the move, Bitglass found the majority of the cloud activity happening at the state and local level.
"They have a thin IT shop and this allows them to focus on value-added parts of their business, rather than on having to spend on a headcount on managing and maintaining applications that are not part of their core [mission]," Campagna said.
The most dramatic increase was in the education sector, where Bitglass estimates 83% of organizations adopted one of the cloud apps that it evaluated, compared to just 23% a year-and-a-half ago.
