CISPE has promised bold and innovative commitments to promote distributed, multi-cloud, open-source solutions in an effort to enhance competition.
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The tech landscape has always been fiercely competitive, where the big fish swallow the small, and time is never a reliable ally. From the PC wars of the 1980s to today’s battles over AI and quantum computing supremacy, and everything in between – search engines, smartphones, cloud dominance – the race to the top is relentless and rarely fair. Yet, some entities are working hard to level the playing field and prioritize consumer advantage, security, and freedom of choice. CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe) is one of them.
In its latest effort to put European interests first, CISPE has adopted a fully “by Europeans, for Europeans” governance structure. Under the new leadership structure, board positions will be reserved exclusively for European entities, permanently excluding AWS, a longtime board member, from board eligibility. While AWS and other non-European entities can still retain membership, they will no longer have voting rights.
In addition to a fully European governance structure, CISPE has promised bold and innovative commitments to promote distributed, multi-cloud, open-source solutions in an effort to enhance competition and expand choice in cloud infrastructure. However, what do these well-intentioned changes and declarations mean for European companies and enterprises in practice? Beyond regulatory shifts, these changes will have long-lasting implications for cloud strategy, competitiveness and digital resilience.
Below are five critical takeaways that enterprises and CISOs must consider to strategically rethink their cloud infrastructure and future-proof their operations.
Recent board changes coincide with the CISPE European Cloud Commission Observatory (ECCO)’s inaugural report on Microsoft’s progress following a previous antitrust complaint and the subsequent settlement deals. The report stated that Microsoft had failed to demonstrate sufficient progress in developing Azure Stack HCI for European cloud providers to allow CISPE members to offer Microsoft software to their customers at prices comparable to Microsoft’s own.
Although ECCO was initially set up to monitor Microsoft's progress in this area, it also probed Broadcom’s software licensing practices following its acquisition of VMware. The report awarded Broadcom an alarming red, worse than Microsoft, and cited legal proceedings indicating that customers have been cornered into accepting Broadcom’s unfair licensing terms just to remain operational.
Now, with a European-only governance, European service providers and consumers can expect urgent and effective antitrust enforcement that genuinely levels the playing field and prioritises European interests. Monopolistic cloud practices like restricting licensing practices and technology lock-in strategies will face strict penalties, allowing European companies to avoid exploitation and make more flexible, independent cloud decisions that foster true innovation and business growth.
The EU has been a global leader in implementing comprehensive data sovereignty regulations. However, the ongoing tug-of-war over technology and infrastructure has made it clear that the narrow focus on data localisation and GDPR compliance alone isn’t enough. European organisations need a broader, more comprehensive approach that guarantees complete accessibility, control, and independence over the infrastructure and services they use.
CISPE’s newly reinforced commitment to diminish economic and geopolitical dependencies and ensure a resilient, competitive, and independent European cloud ecosystem is a reflection of this critical need for cloud sovereignty at a politically charged time. For single-vendor cloud organizations running entirely on US-based hyperscalers, now is the time to decentralize and diversify their cloud deployments. Having a born-in-Europe cloud fragment is now imperative for EU-based businesses and those serving an EU customer base to ensure long-term resiliency, compliance, and future-proofing as more European-first policies and regulations emerge.
Despite the growing need for cloud solutions built from the ground up based on European values of data sovereignty, transparency, and fair participation, the European cloud ecosystem has remained lackluster and unremarkable for the most part. Many blame excessive regulations and overreliance on US big tech for falling hopelessly behind in the cloud and AI race.
The new governance framework can decisively change that, especially against the backdrop of today’s volatile geopolitical landscape. CISPE has also introduced a dedicated Sovereignty and Strategic Autonomy Committee to meet the political aspirations and growing demand for European solutions. It is expected to propose new policies and regulations that put EU-based providers at an absolute advantage through incentivization schemes for adopting local tech, mandating sovereign cloud options and/or imposing cloud taxes on global big tech corporations.
CISPE’s strong preference for European-owned alternatives doesn’t mean the end of the road for hyperscalers just yet. The reality on the ground is that AWS, Microsoft, and Google still power most of Europe’s cloud infrastructure, and European businesses depend on their services. Currently, no Europe-based cloud provider rivals the big four hyperscalers in infrastructure scale or breadth of services.
With AWS and Microsoft still members of CISPE, the governance change isn’t about alienating big tech but rather gradually tipping the scales in Europe’s favour. This will prevent total dependence and over-reliance, ensuring Europe retains leverage in the current geopolitical landscape.
With European cloud players lagging far behind hyperscalers, CISPE has adopted a more nuanced approach to digital autonomy, emphasizing distributed, open-source solutions and multi-cloud strategies. Organizations must develop a flexible and agile cloud strategy that enables them to seamlessly select, switch, or drop vendors as needed. This requires prioritizing true cloud-native principles and adopting orchestration platforms that facilitate deploying, monitoring, and managing resources across any cloud provider without complex reconfigurations.
By adopting a balanced, multi-cloud approach that embraces both local and global strengths, Europe can hold on to its values and digital sovereignty without losing the benefits of established cloud ecosystems. For organisations that have not prioritised cloud strategy yet, now is the time to pause and map out a clear, future-proof plan for the next five years, instead of leaving it to chance and risking setbacks down the line.
Current geopolitical conditions demand a flexible cloud strategy from European companies, and that’s exactly what the emma cloud management platform is designed for. Born in Europe, emma has always strived for, and delivered, freedom and democratization within the cloud market.
The emma platform consolidates hyperscalers, small-scale, and niche providers behind its single-pane-of-glass monitoring and management dashboard. This allows you to deploy, manage, monitor, and optimize resources consistently across any cloud provider as if they were a single, cohesive environment. emma’s abstraction and standardization ultimately restore the agility and flexibility you need to retain the hyperscale advantage while also integrating the much-needed European fragment through native providers like Gcore, Scaleway, Leaseweb, and more.
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