The adoption of cloud computing services in the public sector will lead to the creation of 90,000 jobs in the UK, according to new figures from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).
This may be good news for the public sector employees facing redundancy as a result of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, as well as the possibility of not being considered for employment by the private sector.
In Part Two of its report, The Cloud Dividend, which examines the economic benefits of cloud computing to business and the European economy, CEBR revealed that the public sector would see the highest number of new jobs, due to smaller average wages, compared with other sectors. The report was commissioned by data storage and solutions provider EMC.
The report follows a recent trends publication from analyst Ovum, which predicted that government IT will be more open to cloud computing technologies and outsourcing in 2011, as departments work to drive efficiencies.
Part One of the report revealed that 289,000 jobs are expected to be generated cumulatively over the 2010 to 2015 period in the UK, which means that the public sector jobs would represent 31 percent of the total cloud-related jobs. The calculations take into account the government’s spending cuts.
However, despite creating the highest proportion of jobs, the government, education and health sector is only expected to have an economic benefit of £16.6 billion, ranking it third behind the distribution, retail and hotels sector (£34.3 billion) and the financial and business services sector (£25.8 billion). Retail and financial services are expected to create 39,000 and 55,000 cloud-related jobs, respectively.
Meanwhile, the CEBR predicted cloud adoption in the UK would drive the creation of 65,000 jobs (£14.3 billion in economic benefit) in ‘other sectors’, which includes agriculture, energy and utilities, and transport, and 40,000 roles (£9.7 billion in economic benefit) in manufacturing.
Apart from in Germany, where the financial services sector was strongest, the UK trends were generally in line with those across EMEA as a whole (France, Italy and Spain), with the distribution, retail and hotels sector projected to bring the most to the European economy in the period to 2015 (233.4 billion, or £196.8 billion).
The CEBR predicted, however, that the future profitability of this sector will depend mainly on efficiency, rather than volume growth, due to the pressures of reduced household spending power and rising commodity prices.
Part Two of The Cloud Dividend report goes deeper into the initial report’s findings, which revealed that cloud adoption could help the UK achieve economic benefits of £100.7 billion in the six years between 2010 and 2015.
This includes cumulative net total costs savings of £22.4 billion, which involves IT capital savings and operational savings, such as labour, power and cooling. The rest of the economic benefits would be delivered through business development opportunities (£25.2 billion), business creation (£17.1 billion) and other indirect benefits.
