(Disclaimer: This article was originally posted under WIRED but was reposted by Ars Technica with a less clickbaity title. The preview leads to an Ars Technica article, not WIRED)
Because of recent security concerns, there is a recent push for the European Union to migrate away from US-based cloud providers.
The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
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.
However, this transition will be difficult. Not only will it take years to migrate petabytes of data, European organizations may struggle to find comparable alternatives with feature-parity.
"While there are signs of movement, the impact is likely to be small—at least for now. Around the world, governments and businesses use multiple cloud services—such as authentication measures, hosting, data storage, and increasingly data centers providing AI processing—from the big three cloud and tech service providers. Cottlehuber says that, for large businesses, it may take many months, if not longer, to consider what needs to be moved, the risks involved, plus actually changing systems. “What happens if you have a hundred petabytes of storage, it’s going to take years to move over the Internet,” he says.
For years, European companies have struggled to compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s cloud services and technical infrastructure, which make billions every year. It may also be difficult to find similar services on the scale of those provided by alternative European cloud firms."
Are you aware of any European alternatives or potential challenges when transitioning away from US-based providers? Is it even worth doing so in the first place given the cost?