2 weeks Ago By Richard Speed
Danish consultancy Netcompany is the latest European business to warn of dependency on US technology as unpredictability in the White House continues to eat away at trust in the country overseas. In a post on its home page , CEO André Rogaczewski called for "European solutions—built by European companies, run on European data, and accountable to European citizens." "From social media to cloud infrastructure," he writes, "from applications to algorithms, we are dependent on technologies developed elsewhere, by actors who may not share our values.
"This places our security, sovereignty, and democracy at risk." The words are familiar and calls for greater sovereignty, both in terms of data and digital, were repeatedly made over the years. However, recent events and rhetoric from the US administration have eroded trust in US-based hyperscalers.
Just a swipe of the pen in the White House could force US tech giants to disclose all manner of data, some of which might have privacy or commercial implications. In an interview with The Register several days ago, Frank Karlitschek, CEO of German cloud-hosting crew Nextcloud, warned of fears of unreliability – not technical, but political – and the potential for espionage in the event access to customer data was given up. Karlitschek also said the US administration's chaotic approach to the application of tariffs and the pricing practices of the US tech giants were also feeding into a sense of unease.
Netcompany's theme is "Stand Tall Europe," and we do not doubt the Danish publicly traded IT consultancy would be more than happy to sell European wares to customers regarding digital services. Plenty of projects are emerging across the continent designed to wean customers off US hyperscalers and to opt for European provided technology. Fulcrum, a cloud federation project into which the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) association recently invested €1 million , is one such example.
Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud vendor Civo, told The Register , "In the EU these types of initiatives are springing up everywhere." He did, however, bemoan an apparent complacency in the UK. EU regulators have issued digital sovereignty decrees in the past, and US hyperscalers have started to jump through hoops to meet the rules.
Microsoft's EU data boundary is designed to let customers store and process data for its core cloud services within the EU and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) regions. However, Microsoft is still a US company subject to US laws. While its EU data boundary might have seemed a great idea a few years ago, when it began work on the project, things are undeniably different now.
Microsoft has met the letter of the law, but it now must deal with a feeling of unease and distrust in US companies caused by external factors. For European organizations, this means considering where new workloads and data should go and the potential business risk involved in selecting a tech giant that might be subject to the whims of an unpredictable US administration. Or choosing something closer to home, away from the Trump effect.
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