Cloud acceptance in manufacturing: According to the study, automotive suppliers are the cloud pioneers in the SME manufacturing industry: between 13% and 23% of automotive companies use various cloud solutions. In mechanical and plant engineering, on the other hand, the figure is only between 2% and 15%. Cloud-based storage and backup solutions as well as cloud servers are most commonly used in industrial SMEs: 23% in the automotive industry use storage and backup solutions from the cloud, 15% in mechanical and plant engineering and 17% in other manufacturing companies. Only 13% of automotive companies use SaaS as a strategic software platform, compared to just 2% of mechanical and plant engineering companies.