Vision Report

Europe’s Sovereign Cloud Future Depends On International Providers

Gaia-X Infrastructure Build-Out Falters, But Increased Market Transparency And Data Guarantees Will Persist

May 9th, 2022
Paul McKay, VP, Research Director
Paul McKay VP, Research Director
Paul Miller, Vice President, Principal Analyst
Paul Miller Vice President, Principal Analyst
Tracy Woo, Principal Analyst
Tracy Woo Principal Analyst
With contributors:
Martin Gill , Zaklina Ber , Christine Turley

Summary

Gaia-X launched to great fanfare in 2019 as a joint French and German initiative to reclaim data sovereignty from non-European public cloud providers. In 2020 and 2021, Gaia-X failed to deliver concrete implementations that scale beyond limited proofs of concept. While Gaia-X will diminish in importance, some of the standards and values it has developed or championed have been taken up by non-European public cloud providers and the EU Commission and will survive its decline. These improve security and transparency standards across clouds, giving European customers more options to balance security and usability needs in the future.

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