Majority of customers plan to favor domestic providers as sovereignty fears rise
A survey of CIOs and tech leaders in Western Europe has found 61 percent want to increase their use of local cloud providers amid global geopolitical uncertainty.
Around half (53 percent) said geopolitics would restrict their use of global providers in the future.
Gartner surveyed 241 CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe between May and July. It found that ongoing geopolitical tension was fueling concerns over digital sovereignty. Tech leaders in the region were worried their organizations' data, operations, and technology, hosted by and reliant on US cloud infrastructure, could be creating unwanted risks.
The global analyst company forecasts that by 2030, more than three-quarters of all large organizations outside of the US would have a digital sovereignty strategy, supported by a sovereign cloud strategy.
Rene Buest, senior director analyst, said: "Many Western European organizations can't run all of their workloads or core systems in a non-European cloud environment. This is either because they are subject to specific regulations, their customers demand it, or they are considered part of a country's critical infrastructure."
However, the shift away from globally dominant US cloud providers would take time. "While geopatriation can enable local cloud options to meet geopolitical needs, full independence from global tech vendors will take several years of ongoing effort and investments by local providers," Buest said.
As a result, organizations that have been slow to adopt cloud infrastructure might be at an advantage as the run legacy systems, and can decide on cloud solutions or platforms suited to each part of their operation, he added.
The findings come as US cloud providers try to improve their image among Europeans in terms of digital sovereignty and risk.
Earlier this month, Microsoft promised end-to-end AI data processing in Europe in what it calls the EU Data Boundary. It is also introducing in-country processing for Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions in 15 countries, although only the UK, Australia, India, and Japan will have the option by the end of 2025.
The move follows Microsoft's admission in a French court that it couldn't guarantee data would not be transmitted to the US government when it is legally required to do so. The US CLOUD Act gives authorities access to information held by American cloud providers irrespective of where in the world that data is housed. No European customers, whether private or public, had yet been the subject of any such requests, Microsoft said.
In an April blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith acknowledged geopolitical volatility and emphasized the vendor's respect for European values and law.
Google has also taken steps to strengthen cloud sovereignty in Europe, while AWS is expected to announce a similar service before year-end. ®