Does the EU need a cloud to compete with AWS and Azure?
The absence of truly European cloud providers will become “one of the key issues of our future”, says the CEO of aerospace and defence contractor Leonardo.
Speaking before the Italian parliament’s defence committee Roberto Cingolani, CEO of the Rome-based multinational and a former Minister of the Environment & Energy Security, said that public entities should store sensitive data in national clouds, which should then build up to create an EU-level cloud sector.
“In my opinion, a safe country needs a government cloud, at least for financial, health and defence data,” he said according to a report from Reuters.
Cingolani’s timing is interesting, given his statement came at roughly the same time as news broke that Amazon is launching what it says is a sovereign cloud in Europe, specifically aimed at government use, as well as by highly regulated industries.
Of course, there are European cloud providers. Colocation data centres can provide private cloud and cloud-like services, for instance. Then there is Germany’s Hetzner, often viewed as (and marketed as) the budget cloud services option.
However, there is nothing on the scale of Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services – and this is clearly what Cingolani wants to see given his amusing statement that using data centres “may be fine” for the moment, “but if in two generations’ time the grandson of the current owner is a bit mad, we would be in the hands of a madman”.
Of course, as a defence company, Leonardo will have some interest in (and, to be fair, quite a lot of insight into) the need for serious compliance and security measures, so Cingolani’s remarks should not be dismissed. I wouldn’t hand out any contracts on this basis alone, but as a talking point it is probably fair to say that if a given cloud provider is good enough for a company that manufactures fighter jets and attack helicopters, then it’s probably good enough for medical records and tax returns.
Name recognition
One problem is that the cloud giants have grown for obvious reasons. Amazon effectively got there first by targeting developers, while Microsoft has benefited enormously from being the obvious choice for businesses large and small. Notably, Google, otherwise a tech behemoth and an Internet-native one at that, still lags its peers in cloud.
How a new European cloud provider could compete is a question that remains to be answered. Presumably fat government contracts would help, but even they won’t get it into the top league alongside AWS and Azure.
More broadly, though, it is becoming obvious that Europe is lagging worryingly in tech as a whole.
French president Emmanuel Macron has been banging the drum on technological sovereignty for some years. We’ll pass over the fact that this would certainly be advantageous to a country that is home to Atos, Dassault Systemes, Schneider Electric, Thales, Safran, Renault, and a hefty chunk of auto manufacturing blob Stellantis, and just accept it as a fair point.
“We have American and Chinese technologies, which are a risk for us”, Macron said in April, warning that jobs “will be destroyed”, and Europe will find itself “in a situation where we will no longer be able to decide for ourselves”.
A few EU-based cloud providers won’t see the continent become home to a company that can go toe to toe with Google, AMD, Intel, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft or Apple. But it might be a start.
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