What kinds of cloud computing transactions take place in your jurisdiction?

As a G7 economy with mature IT and related services markets, the UK is one of the most important global markets for cloud computing. According to Gartner, judged by cloud spending rates and growth, the UK is among the fastest cloud adopters globally, ranking behind the USA (the world leader in cloud adoption since 2015) and Canada. In its 2018 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard (the latest version since first publication in 2012 and claimed to be the only global report to rank countries’ preparedness for the adoption and growth of cloud computing services), BSA|The Software Alliance ranks the UK at fourth after Germany, Japan and the USA. To account for the difference in the UK’s standing in these two reports, it is worth explaining that the BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard is based on a methodology that emphasises policy areas that ‘matter most to cloud computing’, such as data protection and privacy laws, cybersecurity regimes and intellectual property protection (ie, the effectiveness of the legal and regulatory environment for cloud computing). And it also applies a test of IT infrastructure readiness, in particular access to broadband. Other market analysts, such as MarketsandMarkets™, observe that successful implementation of the UK’s National Broadband Plan has resulted in faster mobile data connection speeds in the UK, which in turn has facilitated the more rapid adoption of cloud services in the UK.

Using the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition of cloud computing, there is extensive use of the three NIST service models: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), referred to below as ‘service models’. Of the four NIST deployment models (private cloud, community cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud (deployment models)), private, public and hybrid clouds are widely adopted. Community clouds are also used, though apparently less regularly.

Originally published in Getting the Deal Through – Cloud Computing 2020 (Published: November 2019) .