European players are virtually absent from the cloud market, thanks largely to bureaucracy and squabbling.
While companies have been moving to the cloud in great numbers, it has been mostly products made by US big tech. Azure was top, followed by AWS and then Google Cloud – the “big three”.
This is the last thing which should have happened. When GDPR came out in 2018 and with the collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield data transfer regulations, many predicted a golden age for European cloud companies.
Instead the EU’s own cloud project GaiaX is reportedly mired in bureaucracy and squabbling, and European cloud companies such as Deutsche Telekom and Hetzner cannot be found. In fact the only serious contender was SAP and OVH.
While Euro cloud makers are making a lot of cash out of the could they have a tiny market share. Amazon, Microsoft and Google clouds accounted for 69 per cent of the market in 2021. Europe’s biggest cloud player, Deutsche Telekom, is two per cent.
European netID Foundation Jan Oetgen said, “It should concern us greatly that only a handful of companies dominate this space, and they all originate from one country.”
This had led to a situation where European cloud providers focus on areas where they have an advantage, such as privacy and data protection concerns, where customers do not want their data in the paws of foreign countries.
Another area they could push is sustainability as the US giants, despite acres of marketing with green hills and solar panels, are reluctant to publish hard data.
