European business leaders are sounding the alarm yet again over the continent’s growing dependence on American technology—and this time, their concerns are underscored by a streak of political turbulence across the Atlantic that’s making even the coolest IT managers break out in a cold sweat. Picture this: You’ve finally convinced the board to embrace digital transformation, invested millions into state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure, only to wake up one morning and discover your entire digital house is at the mercy of the latest U.S. executive order du jour. Welcome to the 2020s, where “sovereignty” isn’t just a Eurovision buzzword, but the backbone of Europe’s digital future (or so we hope).
André Rogaczewski, the CEO of Danish IT consultancy Netcompany, is taking a stand—and he’s not alone in his “Stand Tall Europe” rallying cry. On the company’s homepage, he delivers a pointed message: “European solutions—built by European companies, run on European data, and accountable to European citizens.” It’s a vision equal parts pride, panic, and pragmatism, because as Rogaczewski notes, much of Europe’s digital life, from innocent social media scrolling to the nuts and bolts of cloud infrastructure and critical algorithms, is being propped up by U.S.-built tech. This leaves EU organizations susceptible to not just market whims, but the distinctly unpredictable shuffle of U.S. politics.
Of course, “digital sovereignty” has been a recurring theme for ages—right about the time European IT admins discovered watching GDPR training videos could actually be preferable to hosting your data in servers located somewhere near Oregon. Nothing says “sovereignty” like realizing with a single flick of the White House pen, sensitive commercial or private data you thought was perfectly snug in Frankfurt might be heading right back west—into the hands of a government that’s turned data-sharing into both an Olympic sport and a diplomatic weapon.
From an IT professional’s lens, the balancing act is perilous. On one hand, U.S. tech titans offer tantalizing economies of scale and engineering marvels that homegrown vendors aspire to—and on the other, these same giants could, at the stroke of a pen (or tweet), become the weakest link in your compliance regime. European CTOs aren’t just playing chess with their budgets; they’re betting their entire risk matrices against the unpredictability of Washington D.C. No pressure!
But if you thought this was a momentary blip—just another Brexit-level hand-wringing exercise—think again. The U.S. administration’s “chaotic approach” to tariffs (let’s just call it what it is: regulatory hopscotch) and the “unpredictable pricing” tactics of U.S. hyperscalers don’t help matters. IT managers are realizing that every line of code shipped from Seattle might as well come with a disclaimer: “May be subject to arbitrary political drama.”
Here’s where it gets funny—if you define “funny” as watching empire-building in real-time. The more the U.S. tech companies contort themselves to meet EU sovereignty rules, the more the chorus grows for European-built alternatives. Microsoft, for instance, gamely introduced its “EU data boundary”—all your Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics data can now find a cozy home in EU-land rather than zipping around the global block. But, and it’s a big but, Microsoft is still a U.S. entity, forever waltzing to the tune of U.S. legislation. Cloud compliance may win you a prize for paperwork, but it doesn’t neutralize foreign influence.
This situation would almost be comedic were it not so critical. Europe’s C-suites are spending late nights pondering if their future cloud migrations are less about price/performance ratios and more about avoiding the “Trump effect.” When every policy change in D.C. could upend your best-laid disaster recovery plan, maybe investing in homegrown tech stops looking patriotic and starts becoming merely prudent.
Mark Boost, CEO of the UK’s own Civo cloud, tells The Register that “these types of initiatives are springing up everywhere.” Yet he’s quick to point out what everyone’s already muttering in the break room: the UK, post-Brexit, is dragging its digital feet (perhaps still hoping someone will invent the GDPR compliance robot).
While national-scale initiatives abound—see France’s “Cloud de Confiance” or Germany’s chorus of local cloud players—the reality is that large-scale, pan-European solutions remain embryonic at best. It’s one thing to bandy about the phrase “digital sovereignty;” it’s another to get European unicorns leaping high enough to match AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, all while observing GDPR and keeping customer service lines inside the EU’s favorite time zones.
IT folks with a penchant for bureaucracy may get a thrill from the EU’s regulatory gymnastics, but most digital leaders simply want to know if their multi-cloud workloads will survive the next geopolitical spat or if diplomatic drama will have a direct line to their servers. Right now, European-made alternatives are more promise than panacea—though their mere existence is slowly shifting boardroom conversations away from “how cheap is AWS” to “how safe is AWS, really?”
Regulators—and customers—are sophisticated enough to realize this. It may be enough to satisfy “the letter of the law,” but the spirit? That’s another story. In a time when public opinion (and procurement dollars) are tilting towards sovereignty, mere legal compliance doesn’t cut it; trust is now the digital currency that trumps all others.
This is where the IT crowd needs to take off their cloud-optimist hats and don their helmets of healthy skepticism. For all the bluster about data residency and sovereignty, even the EU's regulatory hammers can only do so much when the underlying tech remains in U.S. hands. The average IT manager may dutifully check boxes in the compliance portal but wonders, quietly, if an American subpoena could still send their data running faster than CFOs fleeing an SAP implementation.
For CIOs and CISOs, the technical side of cloud migrations is now inextricably bound to geopolitical risk management. It’s one thing to face downtime from a DDoS attack; it’s another to explain to your board how sovereign data just became a bargaining chip in a trade dispute. No one ever thought disaster recovery plans would have to account for “foreign policy volatility” as a risk vector, but here we are.
The true cost of unpredictability is that it forces organizations into perpetual “what-if” mode. What if the White House issues a sweeping data disclosure order? What if tariffs spike and your cloud contracts suddenly include a Brexit-style penalty clause? What if your data boundary is more of a speed bump than a firewall? Each scenario nudges decision-makers just a little closer to the comforting (if currently nascent) embrace of European cloud providers, who can at least offer one ironclad guarantee: data stays on this side of the pond, come what may.
This attitude is risky, bordering on reckless, particularly for industries dealing with critical infrastructure, healthcare, or sensitive intellectual property. The lessons of digital dependency are rarely appreciated until they’ve cost a fortune (or a few million patient records). European policymakers might sound like they’re preaching paranoia, but there’s wisdom behind the warning: betting your entire cloud strategy on the goodwill of a faraway government is, at best, a gamble. At worst, it’s inviting disaster for the sake of convenience.
That means coordinated efforts on a scale that would make even the most red-tape-averse Brussels bureaucrat wince. Unified certification frameworks, continent-wide procurement alliances, and a willingness to invest at the billion-euro scale are the order of the day. Only then can Europe move out from the “refusal to lose” mindset and into an era where its tech sector stands tall—on its own two legs, not propped up by American ones.
For IT professionals, this is both opportunity and burden. Sure, being forced to reexamine decades-old vendor relationships can feel like an existential crisis for procurement managers, but it’s also a rare chance to influence the trajectory of European tech. New projects like Fulcrum, local data consortiums, and EU sovereign cloud initiatives may be early in their evolution, but momentum is growing. The question isn’t if Europe will assert digital independence, but when—and how painfully it will make the transition.
But let’s not trip over nostalgia. European IT needs to be brutally honest about its capacity for large-scale innovation, reliability, and security. Can a patchwork of regional providers really match the muscle of AWS? Maybe not yet, but necessity, as ever, is the mother of invention (and, let’s face it, the parent of a thousand new job titles). With Europe’s best minds now laser-focused on bridging the gap, U.S. hyperscalers might soon find themselves with genuine competition—not just regulatory headaches.
To IT leaders with a stake in the game: Now is the time to reconsider your risk registers, revisit your runbooks, and brush up on your European vendor radar. The digital world, much like British weather, is subject to sudden, dramatic changes. Leave yourself too exposed, and you might wind up drenched.
In the end, the future of European IT isn’t going to be decided by the next U.S. election, nor by yet another turgid white paper from Brussels. It will be forged by the decisions made, sometimes quietly, in the server rooms, boardrooms, and late-night Slack channels across the continent. Trust, sovereignty, and the wild card of international politics—these are now your critical dependencies. May your backups (and your sovereignty strategies) always be tested.
Source: theregister.com European biz calls for Euro tech for local people
The Case for European Tech: Detangling the Digital Umami
André Rogaczewski, the CEO of Danish IT consultancy Netcompany, is taking a stand—and he’s not alone in his “Stand Tall Europe” rallying cry. On the company’s homepage, he delivers a pointed message: “European solutions—built by European companies, run on European data, and accountable to European citizens.” It’s a vision equal parts pride, panic, and pragmatism, because as Rogaczewski notes, much of Europe’s digital life, from innocent social media scrolling to the nuts and bolts of cloud infrastructure and critical algorithms, is being propped up by U.S.-built tech. This leaves EU organizations susceptible to not just market whims, but the distinctly unpredictable shuffle of U.S. politics.Of course, “digital sovereignty” has been a recurring theme for ages—right about the time European IT admins discovered watching GDPR training videos could actually be preferable to hosting your data in servers located somewhere near Oregon. Nothing says “sovereignty” like realizing with a single flick of the White House pen, sensitive commercial or private data you thought was perfectly snug in Frankfurt might be heading right back west—into the hands of a government that’s turned data-sharing into both an Olympic sport and a diplomatic weapon.
From an IT professional’s lens, the balancing act is perilous. On one hand, U.S. tech titans offer tantalizing economies of scale and engineering marvels that homegrown vendors aspire to—and on the other, these same giants could, at the stroke of a pen (or tweet), become the weakest link in your compliance regime. European CTOs aren’t just playing chess with their budgets; they’re betting their entire risk matrices against the unpredictability of Washington D.C. No pressure!
US Tech Dominance: The Elephant (or Bald Eagle) in the Server Room
Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Germany’s Nextcloud (that’s the open-source darling of cloudy collaboration), recently warned The Register not about the usual uptime or throughput hiccups, but about the far thornier issue of political reliability. The new threat model? Imagine an American administration forced to disclose EU customer data, or, worse, that data quietly strolling across the pond due to a well-hidden stipulation in the Patriot Act. Cue your GRC manager’s worst nightmares.But if you thought this was a momentary blip—just another Brexit-level hand-wringing exercise—think again. The U.S. administration’s “chaotic approach” to tariffs (let’s just call it what it is: regulatory hopscotch) and the “unpredictable pricing” tactics of U.S. hyperscalers don’t help matters. IT managers are realizing that every line of code shipped from Seattle might as well come with a disclaimer: “May be subject to arbitrary political drama.”
Here’s where it gets funny—if you define “funny” as watching empire-building in real-time. The more the U.S. tech companies contort themselves to meet EU sovereignty rules, the more the chorus grows for European-built alternatives. Microsoft, for instance, gamely introduced its “EU data boundary”—all your Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics data can now find a cozy home in EU-land rather than zipping around the global block. But, and it’s a big but, Microsoft is still a U.S. entity, forever waltzing to the tune of U.S. legislation. Cloud compliance may win you a prize for paperwork, but it doesn’t neutralize foreign influence.
This situation would almost be comedic were it not so critical. Europe’s C-suites are spending late nights pondering if their future cloud migrations are less about price/performance ratios and more about avoiding the “Trump effect.” When every policy change in D.C. could upend your best-laid disaster recovery plan, maybe investing in homegrown tech stops looking patriotic and starts becoming merely prudent.
European Cloud on the Rise: Fulcrum and the Billion-Euro Dream
If Europe is ever to shake off the digital leash of Uncle Sam, it’ll need more than stirring speeches and open letters. Enter Fulcrum, a cloud federation project brought to you by the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE), into which they recently invested a modest €1 million. No, it’s not quite the rainy-day fund for a continent of digital empires, but it’s symbolic—a proof point that the European cloud isn’t just a mythical creature glimpsed at tech conferences.Mark Boost, CEO of the UK’s own Civo cloud, tells The Register that “these types of initiatives are springing up everywhere.” Yet he’s quick to point out what everyone’s already muttering in the break room: the UK, post-Brexit, is dragging its digital feet (perhaps still hoping someone will invent the GDPR compliance robot).
While national-scale initiatives abound—see France’s “Cloud de Confiance” or Germany’s chorus of local cloud players—the reality is that large-scale, pan-European solutions remain embryonic at best. It’s one thing to bandy about the phrase “digital sovereignty;” it’s another to get European unicorns leaping high enough to match AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, all while observing GDPR and keeping customer service lines inside the EU’s favorite time zones.
IT folks with a penchant for bureaucracy may get a thrill from the EU’s regulatory gymnastics, but most digital leaders simply want to know if their multi-cloud workloads will survive the next geopolitical spat or if diplomatic drama will have a direct line to their servers. Right now, European-made alternatives are more promise than panacea—though their mere existence is slowly shifting boardroom conversations away from “how cheap is AWS” to “how safe is AWS, really?”
Microsoft, Data Residency, and the Impossibility of Total Compliance
Let’s talk brass tacks: Microsoft’s EU data boundary would, in theory, tie up your precious business data so tightly within the EU and EFTA that even the most determined U.S. Department of Justice lawyer would get lost on the way. The spirit of the initiative is laudable, and undeniably, it gives compliance teams a little extra swagger at security audits. But at the end of the day, Microsoft is ultimately beholden to the laws of its homeland. If headquarters in Redmond gets the call, Brussels may end up as collateral damage.Regulators—and customers—are sophisticated enough to realize this. It may be enough to satisfy “the letter of the law,” but the spirit? That’s another story. In a time when public opinion (and procurement dollars) are tilting towards sovereignty, mere legal compliance doesn’t cut it; trust is now the digital currency that trumps all others.
This is where the IT crowd needs to take off their cloud-optimist hats and don their helmets of healthy skepticism. For all the bluster about data residency and sovereignty, even the EU's regulatory hammers can only do so much when the underlying tech remains in U.S. hands. The average IT manager may dutifully check boxes in the compliance portal but wonders, quietly, if an American subpoena could still send their data running faster than CFOs fleeing an SAP implementation.
The Trump Effect and the Cost of Unpredictability
It’s hard to avoid the looming shadow of U.S. politics, even in the sanitized, jargon-filled world of cloud procurement. With a possible Trump 2.0 era on the horizon, there’s renewed urgency around the risk European businesses are taking if they stay wedded to American tech. It’s not the technology itself that’s in question—it’s the framework in which it operates. Policies shift, alliances wobble, and, let’s face it, the last few years have shown us that international agreements are only as solid as the latest morning’s Twitter feed.For CIOs and CISOs, the technical side of cloud migrations is now inextricably bound to geopolitical risk management. It’s one thing to face downtime from a DDoS attack; it’s another to explain to your board how sovereign data just became a bargaining chip in a trade dispute. No one ever thought disaster recovery plans would have to account for “foreign policy volatility” as a risk vector, but here we are.
The true cost of unpredictability is that it forces organizations into perpetual “what-if” mode. What if the White House issues a sweeping data disclosure order? What if tariffs spike and your cloud contracts suddenly include a Brexit-style penalty clause? What if your data boundary is more of a speed bump than a firewall? Each scenario nudges decision-makers just a little closer to the comforting (if currently nascent) embrace of European cloud providers, who can at least offer one ironclad guarantee: data stays on this side of the pond, come what may.
IT Complacency: The Quiet Saboteur
One of the more surprising admissions from those in the trenches is that not everyone in Europe is scrambling for tech independence. Mark Boost’s rueful assessment of “complacency” in the UK is echoed across the continent. Decades of cost efficiency, innovation, and ubiquity have convinced many IT leaders that, since American tech works and ticks most regulatory boxes, there’s “no rush” to shift gears—until, of course, a crisis erupts and then it’s scramble time.This attitude is risky, bordering on reckless, particularly for industries dealing with critical infrastructure, healthcare, or sensitive intellectual property. The lessons of digital dependency are rarely appreciated until they’ve cost a fortune (or a few million patient records). European policymakers might sound like they’re preaching paranoia, but there’s wisdom behind the warning: betting your entire cloud strategy on the goodwill of a faraway government is, at best, a gamble. At worst, it’s inviting disaster for the sake of convenience.
From Vendor Hegemony to Continental Confidence?
If we’re going to shift from dependence to true digital sovereignty, Europe needs a rethink of its entire approach. It’s not enough to wish for homegrown innovation or simply incentivize local cloud startups; the continent must foster an ecosystem where the best European tech is more than just an alternative—it’s the obvious first choice.That means coordinated efforts on a scale that would make even the most red-tape-averse Brussels bureaucrat wince. Unified certification frameworks, continent-wide procurement alliances, and a willingness to invest at the billion-euro scale are the order of the day. Only then can Europe move out from the “refusal to lose” mindset and into an era where its tech sector stands tall—on its own two legs, not propped up by American ones.
For IT professionals, this is both opportunity and burden. Sure, being forced to reexamine decades-old vendor relationships can feel like an existential crisis for procurement managers, but it’s also a rare chance to influence the trajectory of European tech. New projects like Fulcrum, local data consortiums, and EU sovereign cloud initiatives may be early in their evolution, but momentum is growing. The question isn’t if Europe will assert digital independence, but when—and how painfully it will make the transition.
The Road Ahead: Sovereignty, Security, and a Splash of Scandinavian Sass
The power struggle over European digital destiny is more than bluster—it’s a fundamental reckoning over values, priorities, and the role of technology in society. For years, European organizations have played second fiddle to U.S. cloud titans, reaping the benefits but inheriting the risks. The winds are shifting, and with every headline about U.S. political instability, the business case for sovereign, accountable, European-run solutions gets a little bit stronger.But let’s not trip over nostalgia. European IT needs to be brutally honest about its capacity for large-scale innovation, reliability, and security. Can a patchwork of regional providers really match the muscle of AWS? Maybe not yet, but necessity, as ever, is the mother of invention (and, let’s face it, the parent of a thousand new job titles). With Europe’s best minds now laser-focused on bridging the gap, U.S. hyperscalers might soon find themselves with genuine competition—not just regulatory headaches.
To IT leaders with a stake in the game: Now is the time to reconsider your risk registers, revisit your runbooks, and brush up on your European vendor radar. The digital world, much like British weather, is subject to sudden, dramatic changes. Leave yourself too exposed, and you might wind up drenched.
In the end, the future of European IT isn’t going to be decided by the next U.S. election, nor by yet another turgid white paper from Brussels. It will be forged by the decisions made, sometimes quietly, in the server rooms, boardrooms, and late-night Slack channels across the continent. Trust, sovereignty, and the wild card of international politics—these are now your critical dependencies. May your backups (and your sovereignty strategies) always be tested.
Source: theregister.com European biz calls for Euro tech for local people
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