20% of current workloads on hyperscalers will migrate to local providers
By 2027, Europe is expected to surpass North America in terms of IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) spending… for security reasons. The “sovereign” label is no longer enough! Geolocation is becoming a reality.
“Faced with rising geopolitical tensions, organizations outside the United States and China are investing more in sovereign cloud IaaS to gain digital and technological independence,” explains Rene Büst, Senior Director, Cloud & Digital Sovereignty, Gartner. This will be very clear in Europe.
While Gartner argues that the goal is to keep wealth creation within borders in order to strengthen the local economy, it is mainly to protect against the risks inherent in extraterritorial laws such as the Cloud Act or FISA 702.
The market is changing…
Geolocation is becoming a reality. The first sign of this is that 20% of current workloads will escape global providers in favor of local providers. In addition, 80% of this spending will come from new digital solutions or existing workloads awaiting migration to the cloud.
“It is not enough to treat digital sovereignty as simply a matter of security, regulation, and compliance,” says René Büst. The market is changing. Hyperscalers are under increasing pressure, with local cloud providers gaining market share and governments demanding greater regionalization of platforms to meet regulatory and national security requirements.
“It’s not really migration that’s at stake,” continues René Büst. “It’s more about the new workloads being developed and those that are still on-premises and will be migrated.” The heart of the matter is not only legal al sovereignty, but also the technological dependence created by years of integration.
IaaS is only one step
The more a company has relied on a hyperscaler’s proprietary services, the more complex, time-consuming, and costly it becomes to disengage. This lock-in explains why the decision is often made on an ad hoc basis, starting with new projects and migrations from on-premises, rather than a head-on exit from existing workloads.
This is a pragmatic, fundamental shift, driven by CIOs and senior management who think in terms of risk, resilience, and operational autonomy. And IaaS is only one step. Autonomy must also come through software building blocks that are closer to the user, where the effect of dependency is immediate and visible.
