Some 48% of respondents to the ‘Survey and Analysis of Cloud-Based Application Usage’ report said that security of organisational content and data was the most concerning factor of using cloud computing.

The research findings were published on Friday by market research company Vanson Bourne and UK-based software company Centrix following a survey that asked a range of local and central government organisations with more than 1000 staff about their cloud applications aspirations, habits and results. Employees in the commercial sectors were also invited to respond.

After security, the second most worrisome elements of implementing public sector cloud-based applications were found to be the use of cloud apps sourced or commissioned without involving the IT department (12%) and managing the increasing number of cloud apps in use’ (also 12%).

Those who responded to the survey were also asked ‘what is your organisation's number one priority for its cloud applications in 2015?’, to which 24% answered ‘pilot the use of cloud applications in a specific business unit or department’ and 40% answered ‘make cloud the first choice when introducing new applications to the business’, “perhaps encouraged by UK government policy and the increasing number of solutions available to purchase via the G-Cloud Digital Marketplace”, said the report.

The survey found that just 8% of respondents would make it their priority this year to move applications to the cloud where possible and the same amount replied that piloting the use of cloud applications within a specific application type such as office productivity or storage, was top of their cloud to-do list.

Meanwhile, 20% said that they were not focusing on cloud applications at all.        

An average of 40% of the public sector respondents are running applications in the cloud.  The most widely adopted applications are Office productivity tools like Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs (46%) followed by conferencing and communications tools like. WebEx and Lync (40%).