More than half of IT leaders in Western Europe want to become less dependent on global cloud providers. Sovereignty is increasingly driving the IT budget.
Geopolitical tensions are causing 61 percent of CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe to focus more on local or regional cloud providers. This is according to a survey by Gartner of 241 Western European IT managers.
Total IT spending will increase by eleven percent to 1.4 trillion euros in 2026. In addition to the usual drivers AI and cybersecurity, sovereignty is also increasingly determining how the budget is spent.
Need for Digital Sovereignty is Growing
Organizations are concerned about their digital sovereignty: the ability to maintain control over data, IT architecture and applications themselves, without being dependent on foreign parties. Gartner expects that by 2030, more than 75 percent of all companies outside the United States will have a strategy around digital sovereignty. For many organizations, this will coincide with a switch to ‘sovereign cloud’ models.
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During a symposium in Barcelona, Gartner analyst Rene Buest stated that many organizations in Western Europe do not want or are not allowed to house their core systems with non-European cloud providers. Reasons include regulations, customer requirements or the fact that they belong to a country’s critical infrastructure. 53 percent of respondents say that geopolitics will limit their future use of global cloud providers.
Open Source and Geopatriation as Alternatives
Some organizations are considering bringing their workloads back from large cloud vendors to local players. Gartner calls this ‘geopatriation’. This requires long-term efforts and investments from local providers.
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In addition, 55 percent of CIOs and IT leaders view open source technologies as an important element within their future cloud strategy. Open source can offer flexibility and customization, but also brings complexity. Many open source projects are fragmented and require coordination.
According to Buest, organizations that are not yet far advanced with cloud migration are now, contradictorily, in a good position. They can specifically choose which cloud solution or platform best suits each part of their IT landscape, whereas organizations that have put many eggs in the same cloud basket cannot migrate from one day to the next.
Buest concludes that CIOs and IT leaders are themselves responsible for the digital autonomy of their organization. Cloud providers or service providers will not do that for them.