Firms in the UK are more cautious about adopting cloud services than their US counterparts, according to research from infrastructure company RainStor.

Just 22% of UK firms use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications compared to 49% of UK companies. Similarly, while 28% of UK firms said they would adopt cloud services in the future, 42% of US firms were eager to make that step.

This caution was also reflected in the fact that 82% of UK firms said they extracted a copy of their data from the cloud at least once a week, compared to 46% of US organisations.

Firms cited three main reasons for taking a copy of data. First they wanted a copy in-house as an insurance policy against cloud vendors going out of business, and second, they were also concerned about data ability.

“The third reason is that companies want to capture the business-critical data from SaaS or the cloud and want to do analysis on it,” said Julian Cook, vice president of business development.

The research was based on 300 US and 100 UK senior IT decision makers in companies with 500 to 5,000 employees.