We know Netherlands for their beautiful canals and magnificent dykes, but did you know about their high levels of cloud adoption?

A quick research shows that most large and medium organizations use cloud in one form or another. Take their Central Bank, for example. Many of their applications are in the cloud, and so is it with multinational companies, school systems and more.

A detailed study was conducted by an IT training provider called Global Knowledge in December 2016. This study included 500 Dutch companies, all of which were asked about their cloud usage including their SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and other aspects of cloud. The results showed that an astounding 75 percent of companies use cloud, and these numbers are only expected to increase in the coming years.

The participants of this study said that the main reason for them to move to the cloud is the flexibility and scalability that comes with it. They have seen their business performance improve and their upfront investment costs in hardware and software come down, and this is why many of them plan to completely move to the cloud soon.

Let’s take a few case studies to see how cloud has impacted the Dutch market. The Voice of Holland is a television talent show that saw a huge surge in network traffic on the final day of the season. Despite a sudden surge in traffic, there were no network breakdowns or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. On the contrary, the network scaled up, and everything turned out to be fine.

This TV show uses cloud to increase or decrease its capacity, based on the number of users. The initial few weeks of the show will see a relatively lesser number of users when compared to the latter weeks when interest picks up and everyone wants to see the winner of the season. Since cloud makes it easy to scale up or down seamlessly, it has really helped this TV show to have a cost-effective operational model.

Another example of a Dutch company that uses cloud is Aviko, an international potato processing company. It adopted Amazon Web Service (AWS) only about six months ago, and this move has paid rich benefits for the company. When it had an opportunity to expand to China, this partnership with AWS helped to create the right hardware and computing infrastructure for the company.

Before AWS, Aviko was using SAP’s ERP, and the company is sure that it wouldn’t have helped its new center in Inner Mongolia to connect to its headquarters in Netherlands. To top it, there were restrictions on Internet usage by the Chinese government and this created a lot of latency and VPN-related issues. It was then that the company decided to have a copy running in China’s AWS, as this seemed like a simple plan. Today, Aviko is a well-established supplier in the Chinese market and is looking for more expansion within China. In this sense, this move to AWS has been helpful for its expansion plans.

These case studies show how Dutch businesses make the most of what cloud offers. Maybe there’s a lesson for each of us here!

The post Cloud’s Wide Reach Among Dutch Businesses appeared first on Cloud News Daily.