I recently read some interesting articles (see [1,2]) by Bert Hubert about IaaS and SaaS in the EU, which are generally considered cloud computing at large. He has quite a deep understanding of such topics, and the reading is enjoyable and triggered a few reflections.
The problem could be analyzed as a vast version of the indie web movement. Ensuring independence from a handful of big companies, all geolocated out of the continent and possibly subject to the inconstancies of a humoral government, as in current times, is a duty not only for individuals (who should also protect themselves locally), but also for whole countries.
First of all, it is evident enough that Europe is not that bad about infrastructure. In multiple countries on this continent, there are quite a few big companies that have nothing to envy, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, for their capabilities and critical mass. There are already companies with multi-region data centres, a good level of automation, and high SLAs. Of course, they are mid-range companies, not monsters with country-size balances.
It is already perfectly possible [3] to depend on EU-based standard capabilities, including email services or file storage, which represent a primary part of common cloud services. What is truly missing is a capable enough set of web-based cloud personal productivity software based in Europe, which would be comparable to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, including video conferencing and instant messaging.
Other important services could be Youtube equivalent, but what it is evident for me is that such kind of services are also available at small scale, what it is really missing is a sizeable financial effort to fund consistently projects that already exist in the FOSS/indie web ecosystem and the will of doing that instead of paying new consortia to develop from scratch some new solutions. Europe is full of brilliant people and companies that are just waiting for that.
As a personal example, by manual, at work, the central management recently abandoned the whole idea of maintaining fully on-premise systems to move some key services to the cloud for the entire national research network. Our non-specialistic needs were quite average profile: shared storage, email system, the usual personal productivity tools like Microsoft Office, and a teleconferencing/webinar system. The same could be enough to cover the digital needs of most of the companies and bodies out there in Italy. The result has been a national contract with Microsoft for MS365 and a more limited contract with Cytrix for GotoMeeting/Webinar. IMHO nothing is transcendental, something that could be implemented with a decent pumping of money to scale up a multi-datacenter on-premise solution to have full redundancy and an equally decent dedicated team, with many more possible features and capabilities available, at the end of the day. Maybe the only actual key point was the availability of MS Office, which is the only severe lock-in source for most users (and also why Google Workspace here has no hope of being considered). But even in the past, we paid a lot of money for desktop multi-licenses in any case, without any additional cloud solution.
I will not deal deeply with these incomprehensible dependencies on a single application: in my honest opinion, a lot of users are simply too lazy to refuse such a kind of lock-in, even if they depend on a very limited number of features of such an application. There are at least three different alternative desktop programs that most users could use successfully, but we still see Microsoft Office as the holy grail (and I would also add that its web version has an embarrassing UX).
Anyway, so what? That has been a precise abdication to autonomy of digital services and choices, whose consequence will be for sure visible in the future: loose of internal tech skills, missing investiments in FOSS alternatives, lack of human resources growing, and missed diversifications of solution providers (now both located in USA, not even Europe).
Seriously? We did not even have to externalize such services, only to reasonably invest in the right direction for additional human resources and infrastructure improvement instead of paying fees. In the last thirty years, I have not even seen a cent directly paid by my organization for FOSS projects used daily by tons of us, except for some rare fees for conference participation and sometimes indirect payments for people that incidentally worked on FOSS project during their daily job.
Let me be quite pessimistic about the actual intention of European bodies to find a concrete way of improving continental clouds, which could be perfectly viable instead. Until this moment, I have seen only an exaggerated capability of defining rules for the IT ecosystems that are not always sensed and also often misapplied. I saw instead a great lobbying capability by the well-known BigCos that have sustained their own interests and de-potentiated any past effort about this subject (hey, Gaia-X, yes, I'm talking about you).
Is this a lost war? I don't know, but I still don't see concrete signals of changes in European policies about digital innovation, except for a big regulation effort that does not change our full dependency on a handful of US companies. I have more hope in individual actions, but of course, as in the case of FOSS, they require a high level of awareness, which I still see in a limited measure: just compare the number of Mastodon accounts against Meta socials, TikTok, or Twitter/X ones. Maybe we are now at the same level of FOSS as about 30 years ago: a few visionaries and geeks see the problem and act, and most people will follow. Or at least, I hope so.