Poll of 1,000 senior techies: Euro execs mull use of US clouds

Amid the economic uncertainty of Trump 2.0, dependence on American tech has become a growing concern for many businesses, and a survey of 1,000 IT leaders claims that data sovereignty is now one of the most pressing issues. This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator which undoubtedly has skin in …

[3arn0wl]

Nextcloud all the way.

[Doctor Syntax]

"People are more alert than ever to just how valuable their data is, and it's been astonishing how quickly cloud repatriation and sovereignty have become leading strategic considerations for IT leaders,"

What's really astonishing is how they blindly walked into this situation.

[Andy Non]

"how they blindly walked into this situation"

Maybe it was associated with assuming the US is a valued friend of Western countries and a faithful and trusted ally with a lot of shared values. In light of recent events in the US that 80 year old image has been shaken if not shattered. Trust is hard to earn but easy to destroy.

[Kevin Johnston]

Not that astonishing when you consider the increasing reliance on companies like Microsoft and the perverse fad to maximise reliance on a single supplier such as the previously mentioned Microsoft. This despite all the warning signs from previous disasters when companies relied on people like IBM/Oracle to host all their data and discover they were trapped with rising bills.

There is a belief in the C-Suite that they would never fall for such sneaky lock-ins while walking into bloody obvious lock-ins 'because they are much cheaper'.

Very few large companies who have outsourced their IT to 3rd parties and then 'to the cloud' are really saving money over keeping it in-house with their own teams managing the servers/datacentres but they have managed to shuffle the budgets around to hide that fact along with the costs of testing new solutions.

[exovert]

astonishing; not so sure

to the chair warming class, nothing as insidious as something 5c cheaper and 50% more awful

[MalcolmC]

Trump hasn't changed the law. The US government has had power to access data held by US service providers for years: CLOUD Act, FREEDOM Act, PATRIOT Act... Other nations' governments also give themselves extraordinary powers. The astonishment is no one seemed to care until now.

[bonkers]

Reg. grammar error?

Execs mull use of US cloud?

That means they are considering adopting the usage, not abandoning it.

Execs mull [retreat] [withdrawal] from US cloud - would capture it better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reg. grammar error?

It means both.

For "use" substitute "using". Nowhere is the word starting or adopting implied. You've just imagined it.

And yes, it's ambiguous - it's clickbait.

Regardless, if you're going to be a grammar Nazi at least have a valid case.

[JessicaRabbit]

From my personal experience, a lot of companies simply won't be able to make the switch because they're so locked in to proprietary solutions only available from a single cloud provider.

[ffeog]

Gaps in cloud abstraction drive lock-in and way out

Much of the lock-in comes from using vendor-specific APIs and products, if a sufficiently broad "pareto optimal" set of baseline APIs could be defined, then e.g. euro providers could implement them, and euro companies could gradually write their US vendor-specific calls to vendor-neutral. Sure, S3 is quite widely supported for object storage, k8s is heavy but if its the right choice for your container workload it also provides a good degree of vendor-neutrality. What's missing is some abtractions that are broad and capable for: e.g network SDN, PaaSy containers, FaaS/serverless (serverless js framework doesn't quite fit there), unified IAM, FS, AI, VMs although they've had good cross platform tooling for a long time. Then make it all available simply through Terraform, and let geopolitics provide the push as its already doing.

[fg_swe]

Just DO IT

+ Fujitsu SPARC+ARM servers

+ SuSe OS

+ Ubuntu OS

+ MaxDB

+ SAP

+ Hetzner Cloud

+ Ionos Cloud

+ OVH Cloud

+ CompCert Compiler

+ Qt GUI

+ NextCloud

+ LibreOffice

+ RPI

Start small, grow incrementally larger. Stock market will provide the financing.

Have some Cojones and ignore the Hamburger Siren Songs.