Rising geopolitical tensions will fuel a boom in sovereign cloud spending in Europe and elsewhere, Gartner has predicted.
Global sovereign cloud IaaS spending is set to vault 36% to $80bn in 2026, according to the market watcher.
It unsurprisingly pegged Europe as a growth hotspot, predicting spending here will rise 83% to $12.6bn this year, before swelling again to $23.1bn to in 2027.
Gartner’s data comes after UK channel partners acknowledged that US tech dependency is becoming more of a concern among some of their customers.
It also follows the French’s government’s decision to ditch Zoom and Teams.
“As geopolitical tensions rise, organisations outside the US and China are investing more in sovereign cloud IaaS to gain digital and technological independence,” said Rene Buest, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.
“The goal is to keep wealth generation within their own borders to strengthen the local economy.”
Some 20% of current workloads will be shifted from global to local cloud providers amid an increased desire for geopatriation projects, Gartner predicted.
But 80% of the sovereign cloud IaaS spend will come from net new digital solutions or legacy workloads waiting to be migrated to a cloud environment, it went on to say.
“To compete for local customers’ cloud business, large cloud providers must seriously acknowledge the sovereignty concerns and requirements per country, and act accordingly. Solely treating digital sovereignty as a pure security, regulatory and compliance topic is not enough,” stated Buest.
