The European cloud market is rapidly maturing, with 67% of European organisations using multiple cloud services.
Cloud is the foundation for digital innovation and European organisations are embracing cloud services in all their variety, both through building cloud-native applications for mobile and IoT and Edge use cases across all industries, but also to modernise their existing application estate.
With that in mind, there are three major initiatives or objectives that enterprises and policymakers are undertaking that will shape the European cloud market this decade:
- European initiatives to create cloud services compliant with European values: H-Cloud and Gaia-X. Gaia-X was initiated by the German and French governments in October and looks to create a data infrastructure on top of the cloud infrastructure that enables value creation and ownership according to European values. H-cloud has been launched by the European commission to uncover areas where policy intervention is necessary to remove barriers to cloud adoption and value creation by European organisations. They both show that Europe wants to create its own rules for the cloud.
- Enterprise workloads (SAP, Oracle, etc) moving to the public cloud. The next wave of cloud adoption is about moving enterprise critical applications to the public cloud, to modernize the underlying infrastructure but also to prepare them for modernisation. When moving their high-risk applications to the cloud, customers need strong assurances from their cloud providers that the resiliency, performance, security, privacy and regulatory compliance of their applications is guaranteed.
- Shift towards use cases. The conversation around cloud is moving away from being solely a technology discussion towards a business discussion, as customers want to advance their digital innovation agenda through discrete use cases and only as a second step through technology acquisition. At IDC, we have identified the most cloud-intensive use cases that customers are pursuing and will talk about them throughout the year.
2020 promises to be the year that starts to steer the European cloud market to new realms, where we will see a lot of focus on what cloud computing means for the unique European organisations landscape and what the European way into the cloud will look like.
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