The urgent need to reduce public spending has been a hot topic in recent months and few commentators have questioned this requirement. IT is going to see cutbacks of up to 40% between now and 2014, and the coalition has identified 300 projects which can be justifiably struck off.
A study by analyst Ovum revealed that outsourcing is helping public bodies slash expenditure while securing access to upgraded infrastructure. The G-Cloud alone is set to reduce annual expenditure by £4 billion by the end of the decade through consolidating 8,000 data centres into 12 G-Cloud sites.
Despite such cutbacks as well as the inevitable redundancies they will bring Cloud Computing is set to provide over 90,000 jobs within the public sector, according to EMC. This is supported by reports issued by Gartner, which have predicted that government IT would be increasingly open to Cloud Computing during 2011.
However the public sector will generate the lowest revenue across all sectors engaging in Cloud Computing. In fact the health and education sectors will only generate an economic benefit of £16.6 billion, which is relatively low.
The retail and hotel sectors for instance are expected to generate £34.3 billion within the same period. In addition the finance and business sectors are expected to generate a further £25.8 billion.
The CEBR has predicted that Cloud adoption would also drive the creation of 65,000 jobs (£14.3 billion) in remaining sectors including agriculture, energy utilities, transport and manufacturing.
The second part of the Cloud dividend report goes deeper into the initial report’s findings. Here it is revealed that Cloud adoption could help the UK achieve overall economic benefits of £100.7 billion, in the period leading up 2015.
Across Europe recent reports claim that within five years Cloud Computing could add a combined revenue of £645 billion to the economies of France, Germany, Italy, Spain as well as the UK, creating 2.4 million jobs in the process.
Such reports are leading to the widely felt conclusion that Cloud Computing could play a large part in dragging World economies out of recession.
