SAP splashes €20B on Euro sovereign cloud push

SAP says it will pump €20 billion into expanding sovereign cloud infrastructure in Europe over the next ten years, pitching itself as a secure and compliant alternative to American cloud giants. The Germany-based enterprise software biz is looking to provide sovereign infrastructure for the public sector and regulated …

[may_i]

Danger Will Robinson!

...SAP had struck deals with French AI company Mistral and business services company Capgemini to support customers concerned about data sovereignty...

Anyone with half a brain cell should know that entrusting anything to Capgemini is a much worse idea than letting the USA steal your data.

[fg_swe]

Says Who ?

American GigaCorp ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious really

The recent admission in the French Parliament by Microsoft that a cloud service provider based in the US can hand over contents of a so called sovereign server in Europe has basically torpedoed the hosting model cross boarders...

I can't name who, (Official Secrets act) but I know for a fact that at least one UK body was thinking of moving from SAP ECC to SAP S/4 cloud - and they really don't want Uncle Sam looking at anything on their system.

SAP initially partnered with Amazon, Google and Microsoft for their cloud provision, but given that they are all vulnerable to Uncle Sam helping himself to your data - that now looks like a risky option, and SAP must provide hosting that's only subject to the country that the customer resides in...!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Obvious really

"SAP initially partnered with Amazon, Google and Microsoft for their cloud provision"

I can't speak about S/4 but for HANA (monster in-memory database) SAP also did in the past run their own Bare Metal Private Cloud in SAP's own data centres worldwide for large HANA customers, the "small" HANA customers had to make do with AWS, Azure, GCP.

Interestingly enough many of the HANA Bare Metal Cloud customers were large USA corporations with their HANA servers not necessarily being provisioned in the USA.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Obvious really

That should have torpedo’d the current US/EU Data Sharing Framework…. For the 3rd time at a strategic level.

US Patriot Act

US Cloud Act

US FISA Act

… all predating the Orange Orangutan and his lawless administration. Christ knows what the FBI, NSA, CIA are up to now with political sycophants now in charge.

[andy the pessimist]

SAP has about 50% of its employees in the USA and an NYSE stock listing. How can they be independent of usa cloud, patriot act.

Put it under SAP DE sub company?

[fg_swe]

Well

I guess it depends on the number of Cojones in a certain Berlin office.

When it came to the US fleecing Volkswagen and Bayer, there were none left.

It's also a matter of defence policy - if you want American soldiers to defend yourself in each critical situation - then you are beholden to U.S. demands.

Many Europeans operate exactly under this motto - America should do the fighting and all the dirty, bloody business. Like mowing the Iranian-Yemenite lawn or keeping a certain Euro tyrant in check.

Then the Europeans will be lecturing the Americans how bad they were, when they did the lawnmowing.

[fg_swe]

IT Airbus From Bottom Up

There already exist quite a few companies, products and systems to be used. They are not AWS-scale, but that might in many cases be an advantage. I am a Hetzner mini customer and they always respond to my questions+requests in time and with competence.

So if you are an IT decisionmaker, just give Hetzner a try. First for small projects, then midsize and eventually large-scale. Hetzner does have an API to spin up and down servers by shell script. Find out whether you like their technology and their customer support.

Then there are OVH, Ionos, Stackit/Schwarz IT, Deutsche Telekom and the British have their own companies. Give them a try, too.

Regarding IT Systems, there are plenty of non-monopolist alternatives to be used:

https://di-fg.de/IT_Airbus.html

Regarding SAP - they are a behemoth, but always anxious to never compete with Google, Amazon and MSFT base services. It can be seen in their rhetoric here. They were anxious not to create an alternative to Google Search and this smells of very much being beholden to foreign interests.

[Dan 55]

Re: IT Airbus From Bottom Up

Or go down to Lidl and buy a cloud.

[fg_swe]

StackIT

No need for a history link, it is alive and kicking:

https://www.stackit.de/de/

[Like a badger]

Re: IT Airbus From Bottom Up

"There already exist quite a few companies, products and systems to be used."

There's often a margin to be paid to avoid US tech behemoths. Personally I'm comfortable that sensible companies and governments will pay that (up to a point), whether CEOs and ministers think the same I'm uncertain. If ever Europe wanted to break the US tech hegemony, now is the time but sadly I can't see it happening.

[fg_swe]

Not Necessarily

Example: It is very hard to beat the price of an RPI, which can serve as a Terminal Computer or as a Web Browser Executor. The heavy work can be done on a Fujitsu SPARC server in the datacenter.

[fred_flinstone]

USA is not our friend

EU, UK and others have relied on US for far too long. Now US is openly working against its former friends we all have to transition away. Sovereign datacenters are just one small step.

(Of course there is nothing to stop Emperor Taco restricting access to the tech these datacenters rely on.)