Cloud Computing With Borders May Be On Horizon in Europe
by Jennifer L. Schenker
A proposal to build a national federation of interconnected computing clouds in France, funded in part by government in order to protect the country’s sovereignty, data privacy and local jobs, is gaining favor. Some fear that the idea, which is in part a backlash against American companies like Google, will spread to other parts of the Continent, potentially undermining the promised benefits to Europeans of cloud computing, which is being billed as the biggest shift in computing since personal computers were introduced in the 1970s.
French tech companies and businesses are calling on local governments in France to partner with private companies to build a network of data centers and shared cloud platforms and services that would respond to the computing needs of French businesses, organizations, governments and citizens, giving them an alternative to handing their data to American companies. The group called for local cloud infrastructure to be built with the help of funds set aside for France’s “grand emprunt national,” a €4.5 billion economic stimulus package that will start to kick-in at the end of next year.
Cloud computing is the term for a new form of distributed computing which allows consumers, enterprises and governments to store their data and their applications on networked servers rather than on local computers and data centers and to tap into computer applications and other software via the cloud, freeing themselves from building and managing their own technology infrastructure In addition to reducing operational costs, analysts say the shift to cloud technologies allows radical business innovation and new business models.
Some industry experts in Europe believe only giants like Google and Amazon can achieve the necessary economies of scale in building the massive data centers that underpin the cloud. They fear that national projects will be white elephants and question whether big enterprise customers like Danone and Carrefour will be willing to pay the price of French sovereignty. “Interconnection of hybrid clouds is not a simple problem and the risk is that the benefits come slowly and that local champions cannot grow and reach critical mass fast enough,” say Pierre Liautaud, a Frenchman who has worked in the tech industry for 25 years, holding executive positions at both IBM and Microsoft and heading up start-ups. He is currently organizing a November conference for the European Tech Tour Association to highlight European start-up companies in cloud computing. Most start-ups in Europe are concentrating on creating applications that run on top of infrastructure built and run by American companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
