European enterprises are reaching a new scale of public cloud usage. 92% of companies in France, the UK and Germany say they have adopted cloud computing. 78% say they use a hybrid cloud, and 75% several public clouds, mainly on American technologies, according to a study by the analyst firm Forrester.
“After a slow start, Europeans now recognize the usefulness of the cloud for its support for new applications, but also for its affordable computing and storage capacities for existing applications”, mentions the study.
As European enterprises have made a major shift to the cloud in search of speed, scalability and innovation, the main concerns about using the public cloud are security and privacy around data protection and disaster recovery (32%). This is followed by the issue of application security and protection (31%). Less critical, but still important concerns are lack of internal governance over public cloud storage (26%), lack of performance (23%), and compliance (21%).
Forrester’s “State of Cloud in Europe 2022” report shows that, on average, European enterprise infrastructure decision makers say 41% of their total application portfolio is already in the public cloud, while 58 % expect their business to migrate in the next two years.
More than half (56%) of IT infrastructure buyers cite modernization as their top priority, according to Forrester. But in the absence of any European hyperscale cloud provider, Forrester notes that regulation is a big issue for European cloud markets.
GAIA-X is not proven yet
The Franco-German GAIA-X initiative has not had a huge impact since its launch in 2020. It should, however, serve as a vehicle to reduce Europe’s dependence on non-European technologies. GAIA-X is led by the French OVHcloud and the German T-Systems.
In November, the French founding member of GAIA-X, Scaleway, left the initiative, claiming to “accept all non-European dominant cloud service providers without any restrictions”. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft joined GAIA-X in 2020. Yann Lechelle, the boss of Scaleway, cited a study by Synergy Research Group which shows that the market share of European cloud providers fell from 27% to less than 16 % between 2017 and 2021.
This decline comes as the European public cloud market has quadrupled. It represented 2 billion euros per quarter in the first quarter of 2017 and had reached 7.3 billion euros in the second quarter of 2021. But the main beneficiaries of this growth have been Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which have invested billions in the scaling and expanding cloud infrastructure in Europe.
Data sovereignty and privacy: a niche market for European players
John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, says European cloud providers could continue to grow by focusing on use cases that have more stringent data sovereignty and privacy requirements.
Last year, the largest European provider of cloud computing services was Deutsche Telekom and it held only 2% of the European market, followed by OVHcloud, SAP, Orange, then national and regional players. Other vendors cited by Forrester include Cleura, Swisscom and T-Systems.
“Concern reigns in Europe,” writes Jeffrey Rajamani, principal analyst at Forrester. “Fears are growing (rightly) that the continent’s digital future is largely controlled by players outside the region. Therefore, the European Union and local governments are setting rules, mandates and standards on how data can (and cannot) travel across the world. »
According to Jeffrey Rajamani, this is not just a European development: more than 50 countries are accelerating their efforts to control data flows with the aim of obtaining digital sovereignty, which requires that data be treated in accordance with the privacy and other standards set by the respective regulatory bodies.
Source: ZDNet.com