The UK government is lagging far behind the US in the adoption of public cloud services, Salesforce. com Inc's chief executive Marc Benioff said.

Speaking during the Cloudforce event in London, cloud based services provider Salesforce's chief criticized the UK government for refusing to accept the public cloud.

Benioff, who met UK Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to discuss the government's G-Cloud and overall IT strategy, said that the UK government was busy in building its own internet-based computing and storage services, and was hiding behind its own private cloud.

He advised that the UK government should be aggressive about Cloud services, adding that accepting Cloud services would ensure cost reduction.

Speaking on the topic, he added, The UK is way behind in this - and way too much into virtualization and the G-Cloud, which is a big virtual machine that has not been executed well.

Salesforce's first data center in the UK will be built in 2012 as the San Francisco-based company is trying to offer more local bases for data storage to alleviate security concerns.