The services of American cloud providers are so widely used that it is “almost impossible” for Europe to completely step away from them.
More and more European companies want to be less dependent on American cloud giants. This possibility is limited, for example by our lack of data center capacity.
Multiple obstacles
According to IDC, at the current pace, it would take twenty years to build enough European data centers to meet public cloud demand. This is without the expected additional demand from AI and new IT workloads. Companies like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are also not likely to want to leave Europe just like that. Switching to another platform requires substantial retraining, something many companies are not keen on.
Additionally, more and more companies are moving away from the cloud, writes The Register. Returning to on-premise or a local alternative would not only be technically difficult but also cost a lot of time and money. And even those who switch often remain dependent in one way or another: many smaller European cloud players run on American technology from the three largest companies.
Few alternatives
According to a report in Politico, the European Commission also seems to be accepting this reality. According to leaked documents, a strategy is set to appear in June stating that complete decoupling is “unrealistic”. Even for companies with strong requirements, Gartner recommends opting for hybrid solutions, such as sovereign cloud on American technology.
Analysts therefore do not expect a massive switch, but rather that new workloads will be more carefully considered. However, the chances are slim that Europe will ever become completely independent from the American cloud.