The shift to cloud solutions is gaining momentum

In his fairy tale "How I Went to Look for the North Maiden," Kārlis Skalbe once wrote that in the North, the sky hangs so low that you can reach it with your hand. Consequently, the locals would keep a spoon in the clouds above the table, ready to be grabbed before a meal.

Clouds are clearly very familiar and accessible to Northerners, as they are also well ahead of the rest in their adoption of cloud services. The latest Eurostat report on the use of cloud solutions by European Union (EU) enterprises reveals that Finnish businesses are the most active in leveraging these new opportunities. In 2023, 78.3% of companies there used cloud-based software and data storage, compared to the EU average of 45.2%. Sweden follows in second place with 71.6%, and Denmark ranks third with 69.5%.

Half of companies in the cloud

In the Nordic business environment, cloud services were embraced even before the pandemic, and by the beginning of this decade, at least two-thirds of firms were already using them. For Northerners, life without local servers or software installed on individual computers is already well-known and routine. But what about the rest?

Other member states are also purposefully moving toward cloud solutions. Countless positive examples of ease of use, an increasingly diverse and high-quality range of offerings, and growing confidence that company data is safer in high-level data centers than in private server rooms are fostering trust in the "cloud." This is also reflected in the statistics. Since 2021, the proportion of EU enterprises using cloud services has increased by 4.2 percentage points, from 41% to 45.2%.

Rapid growth

Even faster growth is taking place in Latvia. The "turbo-digitalization" observed during the pandemic years is now reflected in official data. We have gone from 28.5% of cloud service users in 2021 to 35.8% in 2023, which clearly confirms that we are moving forward with rapid strides. Only Poland, Hungary, and Malta have achieved a faster breakthrough. Admittedly, one cannot ignore the fact that even after this impressive leap, we are still at the bottom of the list, 7th from the end. Here, slightly more than a third of all companies use cloud services, while the EU average is already nearly half.

However, we can still "glean" positive trends from these facts. Specifically, both Eurostatand the data from our own "Digital Leader Portrait" survey confirm that Latvian business leaders understand the advantages of cloud services and are striving to utilize them. We also see a shift in attitude in the usage of our accounting and business management system, JumisPro . Two-thirds of all clients have already chosen it as a cloud solution, and interest in the desktop-installed version among new clients is negligible.

We have observed that the larger the company, the higher the interest in accounting systems in the form of cloud solutions. Statistics compiled last year show that absolutely all Jumis Pro clients with over 250 employees use the accounting system as a cloud service; in the group of companies employing 50 to 249 people, 85.7% have chosen it, while in the 10-49 employee group, the figure is 72.4%. Among small businesses with up to nine paid employees, 62.5% of clients do the same. The most active users of cloud services are companies in the trade, real estate, agriculture, and outsourced accounting sectors.

Convenience is convincing

Companies prefer the "cloud" version because they know it will always have the latest updates, the highest level of data security, and compliance with current legislative requirements. The user does not have to worry about technical matters, and updates cannot be missed or delayed because the service provider takes care of everything. This also includes ensuring that data backups are created.

However, these are not the only advantages. Among private users, cloud solutions once became very popular due to their convenient accessibility. Specifically, one can access their "cloud" storage from any device by entering a username and password. Even if a work computer is not at hand, data can be viewed from a smartphone. Furthermore, many service providers now offer access through intuitive mobile applications.

Businesses also value these benefits, which is why the number of cloud service users is growing. We can now confidently say that this process is irreversible, and it is only a matter of time before locally installed software joins the ranks of once-essential tools that are now nothing more than fascinating historical artifacts, much like CD drives, USB flash drives, or monitor privacy screens.