There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
Ars Technica
I’ve seen a lot of news like this recently from US-based media outlets. As someone living and working in Germany for a German company, I find it particularly interesting that I haven’t heard anything about this elsewhere, not even at my current position where AWS is heavily used. There has been no discussion about this whatsoever.
That isn’t to say that it isn’t happening. The article does indeed cite a few examples such as the Dutch government trying to move some of their services to European-based providers but I still have yet to see any difference in my own experience.
Moving clouds is a messy, expensive business if you are heavily invested in one of the major American providers. I suspect that most companies would have to have a huge financial or political incentive to invest the time and money to do so. A few barbs traded by politicians isn’t going to be enough in most cases.
