Bottom line: European institutions and Germany are working on digital sovereignty in the cloud. US hyperscalers offer sovereign cloud models, but true independence requires critical examination of data center locations, jurisdictions, data protection, and potential lock-in effects.
The unpredictable policies of the US government have intensified European concerns about dependence on large American cloud providers. EU institutions and Germany are developing strategies for digital independence, while hyperscalers are counteracting with “sovereign cloud” offerings.
The erratic behavior of the current US administration has significantly amplified European concerns about its dependence on major US cloud operators. Both the European Commission and the European Parliament have already published documents on this matter. During the current year, the Commission has also solicited proposals for a Cloud and AI Development Act. Germany is also intensively addressing the question of digital sovereignty.
Major hyperscalers such as Azure, Google, AWS, Oracle, and IBM have all launched initiatives to address these concerns with “sovereign cloud” models. However, evaluating these offerings proves difficult: some solutions are pure marketing campaigns – the German ZenDiS refers to such cases as “sovereignty washing.”
When evaluating genuine digital sovereignty, several aspects are crucial: geographically proximate data centers offer advantages for fault tolerance and connection speed. Equally important is the jurisdiction specified in contracts with providers. Also critical are the reach-through capabilities of American parent corporations over their European subsidiaries and their services.
The example of the International Criminal Court in The Hague demonstrates this: sanctions imposed by Executive Order can have significant impacts. How well can sovereign clouds actually mitigate such scenarios? Other central questions concern access by US authorities to stored and processed data under the US CLOUD Act, as well as compliance with GDPR and data protection regulations – particularly relevant for applications where the physical storage location of data is decisive. Finally, there is the question of the extent of dependence created through vendor and technology lock-in. Added to this is the increasingly questionable durability of the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
Source: www.cert.at