Evernote’s Survey: Cloud Services Broadly Banned In Finnish IT Companies

Strict workplace regulations are understandable when the nature of the data is rigorously confident, but actually prohibiting all cloud based applications seems a little harsh. That being said, California-based cloud notetaking tool Evernote’s latest survey results are fairly surprising; according to their survey, every third Finn working in IT is not allowed to use any form of third party cloud services, such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote

Evernote’s survey shows that two thirds of Finns said they use cloud services for work, but only one out of four employees actually had an official authorization from the company to do so. Nearly half  (45%) of respondents said they haven’t received any authorization, but then again they didn’t get any official prohibition either. In conclusion, this means their use of cloud services for most employees is up to ones own judgement.

The size of the company as well as the employees age have a significant impact on whether an employee can use cloud based file management. According to the survey 43% of firms with over 100 employees have an official ban on could service use.

Perhaps the clearest differences are visible between age groups and the results here are clear; the younger you are, the most likely you are allowed to use whatever cloud service you wish. 36% of employees aged 25-29 have an official authorization while only 22% of workers aged 30-39 have been given the green light from the boss’s office. Employees aged 40-45 dwell down in 14%.

The General Manager of Evernote’s Europe branch, Cristina Riesen, has a hypothesis as to why the survey results came out the way they did;

“Because younger employees are fairly accustomed in the use of different types of cloud applications for managing their own stuff and they have realised the practicality of using cloud apps, younger employees perhaps tend to more easily suggest the use of cloud apps to their superiors. If you’re used to archive important documents into a service which is available from all devices, ranging from mobile phones to desktops, then why such simplicity shouldn’t be equally appreciated in your work environment,” Riesen said in a Finnish press release.

This all seems like job for the management departments. It’s understandable that with all the headlines bolstering the fear of information breach, companies might have trust issues with cloud services, but then again, for simple, non-national-security-level top secret documents, cloud apps are pretty neat and practical.

Evernote’s survey took place in Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In Finland survey responses were collected from over 800 IT employees aged between 25-45. The most popular cloud based applications for business use among respondents were Google Drive (53%) and Dropbox (13%).