Europe lagging behind US in infrastructure-as-a-service

European enterprises are slowly waking up to the benefits of cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), but there are still some challenges for the market to overcome, according to Forrester Research.

The analyst firm's European Cloud IaaS Outlook said that there has been an 11 per cent rise in awareness of, or interest in, IaaS adoption across Europe, but that the percentage is far higher in the US.

This slow take up has meant that just two per cent of European firms have adopted infrastructure services.

The IaaS market faces a number of challenges in Europe, including strict privacy laws which have placed limits on the way information is moved across borders, something that does not have such an impact in the US.

This is despite the fact that IaaS has the potential to change the way enterprises consume hardware. Forrester said that IaaS offers infinite scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing, which should appeal to IT leaders.

However, for now at least, IT bosses in Europe have an interest in the services, but no desire to adopt them just yet.

Forrester's recent annual hardware survey found that the number of European firms 'not interested' in IaaS fell from 44 per cent in 2009 to 36 per cent in the third quarter of 2010, but this perceived increased interest has not translated into sales.

Slowness in adoption may be down to a number of factors, including local purchasers waiting for the market to mature further, and policy makers failing to improve the regulatory environment.

European firms do not see cost reduction as the most important IaaS benefit, but rather the flexibility of its services which extend to on-demand capacity and scalability.

Other important factors that could push adoption include improved disaster recovery and business continuity, and lower total cost of ownership for servers.

Benefits aside, IT consumers want to see a number of security issues tackled before they embrace cloud infrastructures fully, and those that handle public data are particularly concerned about this.

"Putting private records in public clouds increases the risk that unauthorised parties gain access to sensitive data," wrote Forrester analyst Onica King. "But moving infrastructure to the cloud could also improve an organisation's security posture."

This perception is likely to change over time, as it has with all new technologies, and Forrester expects security innovations, more local European providers and business acceptance of risk combined with business need to boost take up.