Companies may be mandated to embrace cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in the future, IT outsourcing customers may be interested to hear.

According to Doug Miles, UK managing director at the Association for Information and Image Management, some of the decisions about which technologies companies use will not be influenced by technical reasons.

He suggested that changes to corporate regulations, or even intervention by the government, may require businesses to embrace managed hosting services.

“It’ll either be mandated by the government or mandated by corporate – you will use either an open source system or you will use more SaaS or possibly even you will use the cloud, so it’s worth taking a view of what that involves,” Mr Miles noted.

He added that there has been a significant rise in the number of people using the technology in recent years.

Last week, IT research company Gartner issued a cloud computing bill of rights, highlighting the responsibilities vendors have to their customers.