Adoption of services like cloud backup and other cloud computing applications are appearing to be popular for companies in the UK, with new research revealing that take-up rate has reached 84 percent. And in fact, since the first study was carried out in 2010, the adoption rate has climbed by 75 percent.

According to the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), 78 percent of those asked said they have adopted two or more services, with the organisation now predicting that both penetration and adoption will increase sizeably over the course of the year.

In addition, it was seen that the applications that the majority of users believe will move to the cloud over the next 12 months will be customer relationship management, email, data storage and collaboration services.

“While first-time adoption is likely to slow somewhat, penetration of cloud services within organisations, which appears to be happening at a faster rate than we had anticipated, will continue unencumbered. Assuming, that is, that cloud service providers can effectively put forward the business case for adoption and build further confidence amongst end users by improving levels of accountability, capability and transparency,” chief executive officer of the CIF Alex Hilton remarked.

Getting started with the cloud doesn’t have to be daunting. Why not start small and build up to storing more and more of your data in this way? Perhaps think about first backing up local data to the cloud, or implementing a cloud-based disaster recovery service.