According to research firm Gartner, only China and the United States are currently capable of operating a sovereign cloud. VP analyst Douglas Toombs argues that buyers outside those countries cannot avoid relationships with companies from one of those two nations. Even on-premise cloud solutions from American hyperscalers that are considered sovereign do not eliminate this dependency. It will be up to European tech companies to prove otherwise.
According to Toombs, previous sovereign plans have not progressed beyond “nice white papers.” He made these remarks during a local event in Sydney, as reported by The Register. He believes the public cloud market is so stable that a serious alternative on the same scale as AWS, Azure, or GCP is not immediately apparent. However, sovereign SaaS providers and products could be possible.
No exit strategy
Gartner analysts further highlight a sore spot on the part of cloud customers. Where a sovereign vendor is not currently available, there may still be a plan to become independent from American hyperscalers. Given the now global nature of the sovereignty issue (though it is often called by a different name outside Europe), the same applies to parties that purchase Chinese technology. However, an exit strategy is lacking, states Director Analyst Adrian Wong at the same event.
The analyst cites a Dutch healthcare institution that built its own infrastructure but was still affected by an outage because a supplier was dependent on a major cloud provider. There are plenty of examples like this, and they are by no means exclusive to cloud players. The NorthC outage at its own data center in Almere demonstrated that critical functions in public transportation, education, and elsewhere can grind to a halt due to a single link in the chain. This may simply be a financial necessity; a stopgap solution costs money and yields no return if everything goes according to plan. The same may apply to parties that simply accept that they are dependent, regardless of whether the chosen provider is Chinese, American, or European.
As Gartner points out, choosing a product that claims to offer sovereignty is far from a guarantee against dependency. That is a well-known conclusion. The Dutch government previously had lawyers investigate whether the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is sovereign enough, for example. The conclusion was nuanced: technical access by the U.S. is possible, but unlikely. Nevertheless, a sovereign product is not an undisputed answer to the demand for digital autonomy.
Sovereignty is still a long way off
Since organizations have barely considered how to move away from the cloud if necessary, the discussion about sovereignty is actually already a step ahead of reality. First, it must be practically possible to move away from a vendor if it is no longer permissible for legal, geopolitical, or other technical reasons. Tensions are certainly prompting cloud customers to consider alternatives, but that is easier said than done. A migration taking less than two years requires massive planning and investment. Moreover, those using cloud-native services or platform-as-a-service are even more locked in, according to Gartner.
European tech players are seizing the opportunity to differentiate themselves, though it remains to be seen whether they can deliver a mature alternative with the same ease of use as the hyperscalers in the foreseeable future. This is complicated by the fact that multiple vendors are always required to deliver a single “hyperscale” offering. Seven Dutch cloud providers recently joined forces to offer a sovereign alternative. Such options are also being met with responses from the U.S., such as Microsoft Azure Local, which scales up to a full-fledged on-premises cloud.