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Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

theregister.com

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Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#241

Post by 202508042147 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…

MS advantage over Google docs was exactly what US cloud providers have over everyone else: lock-in.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#242

Post by surgical_fire »

lucasRW wrote: post #138

Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means". There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroy…

> There is no EU

> what has destroyed Europe.

Hyperbole much?

I think you completely misunderstand what the EU is, the position of its member states, etc.

It's hard to take any point you tried to make seriously given that.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#243

Post by aenis »

I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".

I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.

However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.

Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.

And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.

On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#245

Post by alecco »

xoac wrote: post #41
alecco wrote: post #31

Sadly the EU leadership is a bunch of professional bureaucrats living in a comfy bubble completely disconnected with the people or reality.

As opposed to.. the harsh realities of the Bay Area tech scene?

I'm not happy with the upcoming techno-feudalism, but a bunch of (mostly) un-elected lawyers and economists have no clue on how to build cloud.

And it's not that they want to help EU citizens, they just want to be techno-feudal lords themselves. Or worse, more like CCP.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#246

Post by naiv »

znnajdla wrote: post #239
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…

My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.

The truth no one wants to hear

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#247

Post by lII1lIlI11ll »

ozim wrote: post #157
margorczynski wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US. You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.

Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side. If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU. In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is cappe…

> If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high

The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#248

Post by belorn »

9dev wrote: post #91
bambax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.

> So much cheaper to operate and control. Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manag…

Listened to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup.

Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.

I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#249

Post by nixpulvis »

kioku wrote: post #43

> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play. The woes of LLM contrasts… In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.

Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.

So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?

If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#250

Post by mark_l_watson »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #145
moffkalast wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all rather performative. If those get blocked the entire bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and entire countries might actually collapse.

Proton. Also, Collabora office looks really great too.

Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but could use improvement. Their secure and private file and docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great feature, if you need it.

EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal testing.

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