During the pandemic, some organisations in Europe had an incidental propensity for cloud, but in the wake of the pandemic, cloud has emerged as a much more viable pursuable strategy. And the increased number of cloud regions made available in Europe by the cloud vendors has changed the way organisations are approaching cloud discussions.

This will drive an increasing acceptance of public cloud in Europe, including in those domains commonly addressed as regulated industries, such as banking, healthcare, and insurance.

For 2023, Forrester predicts that:

  • EU governments will accelerate national digital transformation with effects on the private sector. The Gaia-X data sovereignty framework for Europe has failed to deliver concrete services but spurred wider efforts. Major hyperscalers responded with renewed commitments to data privacy (AWS and Azure in 2021) and by providing new sovereign cloud offerings. Some EU countries can already count on government-sponsored initiatives focused on strengthening the sovereign cloud infrastructure, which will host public services at first and is driving more adoption in the private sector. These initiatives usually leverage a telephony provider, a system integrator headquartered in the country, and the collaboration of a hyperscaler. The hyperscalers are pivotal in driving the construction of the public cloud development and infrastructure platform for the governments.
  • Banks and regulated sector organisations will adopt cloud at an unprecedented pace. Large German financial services companies are piling into these offerings in 2023, followed by French and Italian financial services and insurance (FSI) organisations. This is meant to achieve higher resilience of the IT landscape as well as foster innovation thanks to third-party specialised cloud-based platforms. The Italian vendor OCS for example provides its cloud-based nano-lending solution, REDO, to major consumer financing organisations, allowing clients to offer microloans for amounts between €300 and €1,000. This would be uneconomical with the traditional processes and tools of financing organisations running out of the cloud environment of the banks and financial institutions.
  • Kubernetes (K8s) will gain momentum to orchestrate containerised applications. Organisations will resort more and more to K8s to run their current applications and workloads more efficiently in domains such as AI, edge computing, and IoT, among others. The new Lieferkettegesetz (German supply chain act) and similar regulations at the EU level will force organisations to more thoroughly monitor the respect of human and labour rights along their supply chains. These new legislations will finally apply to all companies in the EU or headquartered in the EU. IT organisations will make an extra effort on the IoT and AI side, supported by the implementation of K8s to make the monitoring of the supply chain possible and affordable.

European organisations will have to make sure to adopt the cloud to solve business challenges and do more as they accelerate their digital transformation and continuous integration journeys. Read the full cloud Predictions report here.

Read the full report to get more of our predictions for Europe. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide for European leaders or explore the Predictions hub for additional resources, including webinars.