Borrowing gets harder as PM encourages private sector to help employment in the wake of predicted public sector cuts

Cloud computing assists upfront investment issues

Today the Prime Minister is meeting bosses of some of the biggest UK companies to discuss their plans to create employment in a bid to demonstrate a focus on economic growth rather than public sector cuts.His meeting with business leaders will focus on what more the government can do to create jobs in the private sector. But with obtaining loans at its hardest for years, smaller businesses, the life blood of the UK economy, continue to struggle to borrow to invest and create growth.

Piers Linney, joint CEO of Outsourcery said, “It is vital that UK companies are able to compete effectively and invest in technology that increases productivity and growth opportunities in order to prosper. In 2011, obtaining debt finance is still proving hard to secure despite the government’s best efforts and this means that much needed updates to infrastructure and systems can be difficult to finance. One way to reduce the upfront investment involved in running a business is to take advantage the opportunities Cloud computing offers by changing IT infrastructure capital expenditure (CAPEX)into an operating cost (OPEX) and making infrastructure investment predictable, low and most importantly affordable. UK companies are leading the world in the delivery of Cloud services.”

The Cloud computing industry

Research by the Centre of Economics and Business Research (CEBR) reports that widespread adoption of Cloud computing could give the top five EU economies a 763bn euro boost over five years and create 2.4m jobs. The report suggests that the rapid uptake of Cloud computing service offerings (will make them) progressively cheaper as economies of scale take hold and service offerings mature. The findings are backed up by analysts such as Gartner which predicts that by 2012, 20% of companies will not own their own IT assets.