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Interview European cloud providers and software vendors used this week's Nextcloud summit to insist that not only can workloads be moved from the US hyperscalers, not considering it is "negligent" on behalf of IT bosses.
European organizations are taking a careful look at their workloads and pondering if running workloads on a US hyperscaler is worth the risk, considering the unpredictability of the US administration and concerns around data privacy and sovereignty.
The hyperscalers have responded to these worries – Microsoft has claimed it will fight the US government if demands are made to access customer data. Google updated its own sovereign cloud services in May, and AWS recently followed suit with plans for a "legally independent" EU cloud unit by the end of 2025.
Suffice it to say that some tech giants have a bad case of the jitters as some formerly loyal customers lose faith and trust in the face of an increasingly erratic US administration.
However, there have also been claims that moving away from a US cloud operator is "close to impossible" – the services on offer in the EU can't compete with the US giants, and datacenter capacity isn't sufficient.
Open source organizations such as Nextcloud and the Open Infrastructure Foundation might take issue with the idea they can't compete with Big tech's services, and EU cloud vendors dispute the idea that datacenter capacity isn't sufficient.
During an interview with The Register, Dr Markus Noga, CTO of European Cloud provider IONOS, insisted that scaleability was a non-issue and that the group had sufficient spare capacity, with plans for further growth. "Most customers and their workloads," he says, "are not colossal. They are looking for 200 cores, 2,000 cores, 5,000 cores, 10,000 cores, and so on."
"Our policy is to maintain enough spare capacity."
Noga dismisses what he describes as "sovereignty washing" by some cloud players: "They're like 'Oh, we're a hyperscaler, but we have a local subsidiary. Just trust us, we're going to be good."
Or...
"'Oh, we are a European player, and we're buying a cloud stack from a hyperscaler, and then we're reselling it.' But... if they [the hyperscaler] turn off the updates, how many weeks can you last before being compromised by vulnerabilities?"
"That is not sovereignty."
Noga reckons that the business need will trump the often lengthy regulatory process and cites customers realizing that the world had suddenly changed and alternatives are required. "What has changed," he says, "is that if you are not considering that factor [the changing environment], you are negligent as a CIO."
Interest has spiked, according to IONOS. Noga says, "We are currently fielding inquiries from and actively pursuing opportunities with a multitude of players who would not have considered us before."
- 'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers
- Unhappy with the cloud costs? You're not alone
- Google carves out cloudy safe spaces for nations nervous about America's reach
- European biz calls for Euro tech for local people
He would not name names until the ink is dry on contracts. However, his comments echo those made by other software and cloud alternatives to the hyperscalers. In April, Jonathan Bryce, CEO of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, told El Reg that interest in hyperscaler alternatives had "definitely taken a big uptick," while Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider CIVO said, "It's amazing how fast the change has been."
While some public sector and NGOs have been forced to move quickly, either by regulatory or privacy concerns, Noga reckons that the typical sales cycle for the private sector is "realistically" three to six quarters, meaning that momentum could be discernible within a year. ®
