Recent geopolitical events have given fresh urgency to the question of whether UK and Europe organisations are too reliant on US technology.
A Wall Street Journal article last week contemplated a “worst-case scenario” where a White House executive order cuts off Europe’s access to data centres or email software that businesses and governments need to function.
Even if that sounds far fetched, simmering transatlantic tensions could create a “multi-billion dollar battleground” for sovereign cloud solutions in Europe in 2026.
That’s according to Omdia Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards, who cited Airbus’ reported decision to shift mission-critical applications to a sovereign European cloud as evidence.
In a nod to these changing dynamics, AWS earlier this month struck back by launching its €7.8bn European Sovereign Cloud.
But such efforts may be wasted on many organisations worried that US tech providers could be compelled under the US Cloud Act to hand over their data, regardless of where its stored.
And yet AWS and Microsoft Azure have an estimated combined 70-80% share of the UK public cloud market, according to Ofcom.
Against this backdrop, just how worried are UK customers about their US tech dependency, and what – if anything – can they do to mitigate their exposure?
Who better to ask than leaders from six top UK channel partners, who besides acting as trusted advisors count themselves – to a greater or lesser extent – as partners of the US tech giants?
“I can see it becoming a greater concern”
Scott Nursten, CEO, ITHQ
There’s been growing scrutiny over the dependency of UK business on US tech infrastructure. Is this something your clients are talking about, and do you expect any to change course in light of recent events?
Absolutely. It’s being spoken about a lot, particularly as a data sovereignty concern.
The Cloud Act in the United States means hyperscalers have to turn data over to the government on demand. And given the current climate and the way the US government is behaving and making extremely unreasonable demands, I can see that becoming a greater concern and driving more decision making.
What’s your advice as an independent trusted advisor?
You can utilise all of their infrastructure without succumbing to the Cloud Act. Ao the first [step would be if you can get bare metal options from those providers.
The encryption on disk means that it would take them years to ever get to your data, which would then be pretty pointless.
The struggle with public hyperscaler infrastructure is that you’re using their key management systems – in essence, they have access to your encryption keys that encrypt your hard drives.
They say they’ll never use that, but we know that’s not true. The Cloud Act insists they’ll hand that over to the government, and they’re certainly not going to try and say no, especially to the current government that’s in power in the US.
So the first [option] is to go bare metal on their infrastructure that gives you access to their networks and everything else. [This way you have] all the resilience, speed and thought that’s gone into building their data centre infrastructure without giving them the keys to your kingdom.
If you can’t do that, then obviously use local providers. There’s many that are growing very quickly in the UK and in Europe that are focused on data sovereignty. Yes, they’re not the same as the hyperscalers, but they have really good resilience and infrastructure across Europe.
And the third is obviously, do you need to be in the cloud? A lot of cloud-first decisions are actually very poorly made and have not used a framework to get there. We’re strategy led as a business. Have you used a decent strategy or framework to land on the need for a cloud provider?
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
When it comes to the cloud, it’s driven a lot of people to feel self-sufficient, when they’re truly not.
This is not a plug for our services, but we come across end-user customers that have very poorly configured cloud systems, who don’t understand the risks, don’t understand the attack surface, and often don’t even understand the technologies they’re using. The fact that it’s all made available to you through a web browser has seemed to empower end users and customers (but at a great cost). It’s the illusion of control: if you don’t understand what you’re doing, it’s actually more risky that way.
And the view is ‘I can just click the new server button, the new EC2 instance button, and I’ve got a new server so I’m as good as a systems administrator or a data centre and infrastructure specialist of old’. You’re simply not. You don’t even know what’s happened behind the scenes when you’ve clicked that. And that is very risky.
So I advocate for deep understanding before pulling any sort of cloud transition move.
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