Of the 170 SaaS vendors we identified in our UK Cloudscape, about 50% operate their own infrastructure. The other half partners with a hosting provider. 40% of those have their production site hosted outside the UK (see Figure below).
The most popular hosting partner for UK SaaS vendors are all non-UK companies. US providers Amazon (21%) and Rackspace (21%) lead the pack. German providers United Internet (6%) and Hetzner (4%) follow. The remainder 48% is split across a wide variety of hosters (see Figure below).
Should you care where and with whom your data is located? Yes, you should. When evaluating SaaS vendors it is important to understand whether they own their own infrastructure, which hosting partner they have if they do not, and which data centres their own or hosting partner infrastructure is located in. As we wrote earlier, digital data depends on robust digital infrastructure. Also, you should know which jurisdiction(s), rules and regulations your data resides under.
Stay tuned for more analysis on the digital infrastructure market in Europe, there will be more to come!
