A person is seated at a table, facing two laptops.

In 2023, 45.2% of EU enterprises purchased cloud computing services (i.e. services used over the internet to access software, computing power, storage capacity, etc.). This marks a 4.2 percentage point (pp) increase compared with 2021.

This information comes from data on information and communication technology (ICT) usage and e-commerce published by Eurostat today. This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

The highest shares of enterprises that purchased various computing services were registered in Finland (78.3%), Sweden (71.6%), Denmark (69.5%) and Malta (66.7%). At the other end of the range, less than a quarter of enterprises in Greece (23.6%), Romania (18.4%) and Bulgaria (17.5%) made such purchases.

EU enterprises that bought cloud computing services in 2021 and 2023, % of enterprises

Source dataset: isoc_cicce_use

E-mail, file storage and office software – most purchased cloud computing services in 2023

The most purchased cloud computing services in 2023 were e-mail services (82.7%), followed by storage services for files (68.0%), and office software (66.3%). Security software applications (61.0%), finance or accounting software applications (51.6%) and hosting for the enterprise's database (43.0%) were also popular. Around a quarter of the enterprises purchased computing platforms for application development, testing or deployment (26.1%), enterprise resource planning software (25.9%), computing power to run the enterprise's own software (25.4%) or customer relationship management software (25.0%).

Cloud computing services purchased by EU enterprises, % of enterprises that purchased a cloud computing service

Source dataset: isoc_cicce_use

For more information

Methodological notes

  • France and Sweden: break in the time series due to the implementation of the statistical unit enterprise.
  • Data come from the 2023 EU survey on ICT usage and e-commerce in enterprises and refer to all enterprises with at least 10 employees or self-employed persons (in NACE Rev. 2 sections C to J, L to N and group 95.1). Further methodological information related to the survey can be found here.

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