Cloud Services (Europe Market)

Main article: Europe IT Market

2020:25 EU countries create a single cloud infrastructure

On October 15, 2020, it became known that the European Union intends to spend up to 10 billion euros over the next seven years to create a single cloud infrastructure. The results of the work are expected to compete with such large foreign corporations as Amazon, Google and Alibaba.

Twenty-five EU countries signed a declaration in which they agreed to allocate public funds for the development of cloud infrastructure and the creation of the "European Alliance for Industrial Data and Clouds," under which the project will develop.

European countries create a single cloud infrastructure

The alliance will be formed by the end of 2020. Cyprus and Denmark were the only EU member states not to sign the declaration for "technical reasons."

EU Commissioner for the Domestic Market Thierry Breton noted that the declaration "is the basis for creating European cloud technology, which will have very high performance."

Contrary to prejudice, we were not late [in cloud development]. We are the first to connect to the industrial cloud, "he added.

EU governments and the public sector should fully support the initiative, completely switching to cloud services - Liz Fur, ETNO CEO.

The new alliance will have a mandate to develop business plans, investment plans and plans for the implementation of European cloud technologies in the public and private sectors.

The signatories also undertake to create common European standards and policy norms for the creation of pan-European cloud services and to help small and medium-sized businesses, startups and the public sector master cloud technologies.

To achieve digital sovereignty, we need to begin an approach to data processing as large American and Chinese companies approach it, "said German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier.[1]

2016: Dominance of American companies

By the beginning of August 2016, American IT companies unconditionally dominate the European cloud services market. Local business prefers to work with foreign providers, despite general concern for data privacy.

IDC analysts estimated that in 2015, the joint share of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM in the Western European market for services used to deploy cloud infrastructure reached 40%, which is a third more than a year ago. From 2013 to 2015, the total cloud revenue of these companies in the region almost tripled, amounting to $2 billion.

At the same time, the income of European suppliers also increased significantly - by 86% over the same period. It would seem that these companies could make good money on such growth, but they are not as flexible and have not as large budgets as American giants, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jonathan Atkin.

Growth of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM in revenue in the European cloud services market from 2013 to 2015, IDC data

Interviewed by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), experts say that the scale of the business of technology corporations from the United States allows them to offer services at low prices, as well as quickly launch new services and deploy updates.

The WSJ publication of August 4, 2016 also reports that in recent years, American companies have built at least a dozen new data centers in Europe, painfully hitting the business of local competitors and allowing local businesses to be confident in the safety of their data.

This problem became acute after a former employee US National Security Agencies Edward Snowden made public in 2013 the large-scale surveillance by the American authorities of their citizens and users from other countries.

Global losses of American cloud companies from the consequences associated with Snowden's disclosure of classified data on mass espionage by the United States, information technology the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated at $21.5-35 billion over three years.

However, this did not have a strong impact on the activities of American cloud companies in Europe. Their solutions are used by many large enterprises in the region, including the French electrotechnical corporation Schneider Electric, the automaker BMW and the music service Spotify.

In 2015, the Italian energy giant Enel decided to transfer its IT infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services cloud. The partners agreed that all data will be stored in the Amazon data center in Germany. Thanks to this project, Enel in 2015 reduced the cost of computing processes by 11%, and storage costs by 48%. Interestingly, savings would be 8% more if Enel data were posted in Amazon's US data centers.^[2]

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