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Cloud | EU | US | GDPR | Data Sovereignty
The Case For a European Cloud
Can the EU achieve digital sovereignty?
For years, migrating business workloads to the cloud was a no-brainer. Privacy concerns lingered, but the risks seemed manageable — until now.
Recent erratic behavior by the U.S. government, combined with existing extraterritorial data access laws like the CLOUD Act, suggests it’s time to re-evaluate those risks. The CLOUD Act isn’t new — but the current U.S. administration appears less committed than its predecessors to respecting established international norms.
That makes data protection a far more urgent issue.
What qualifies as lawful access under U.S. law may constitute a violation of the GDPR from a European perspective. The right to privacy on one side of the Atlantic can be seen as a protectionist, “woke,” or inefficient regulation on the other — and therefore ignored.
This raises a critical question: can the EU achieve true digital independence? And if so, what gaps must it close to build a competitive European cloud ecosystem — capable of rivaling AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud?
