I think that we're going to see a lot of these initiatives in the coming years. I know a lot of non Europeans, and even a lot of Europeans outside of non-tech Enterprise IT might be sleeping on this a little, but there are some serious powers moving against the non-European Cloud. These powers aren't going to slow down either, they've only been ramping up since 2016 when the EU sort of woke to the threat of a transatlantic relationship that might not be as it had been.

For context I've worked a decade in the public sector of Denmark, and while the GDPR didn't actually change much on the back-end because we already took privacy and data serious, many of the compliance contracts and standards that work with AWS and almost with Azure in GDPR contexts aren't viable in what is now considered national security. Today I work in an investment bank that builds green energy solutions around the globe, you would think that we wouldn't be too affected by these powers in the EU, but the financial sector (and the energy sector) are all considered on the same level as our public services. In the past year, I've had to write up a plan on how we can leave Azure in a couple of days, if the EU deems it necessary to demand that 50% of the European finance sector needs to move away from Azure as a single cloud solution because it's too risky to rely on a single vendor, especially one that is not an EU vendor. Easy enough for my team, we build software, it all runs in containers and it doesn't really care where it runs. Sure we'll have to replace Azure Functions with Express in our node functions, but we've build some automation to make it possible to do in a day to be in compliance. It's much harder to do with our document storage in SharePoint Online and all our federated security build into Azure Active Directory, and, well... Outlook or Windows. I'm not sure anyone has a plan on how to exit Outlook or Windows, but if the EU points at Microsoft and tells us that our number came up, we actually need to tell them how we plan to do it.

The cloud isn't Windows or Outlook though. It'll be hard for us to leave SharePoint Online (you could know this as OneDrive, but in enterprise it's all SharePoint Online), AAD and a lot of the more Operations sided stuff in regards to well running an IT department (I'm sorry, I don't know too much about all those Runbooks), but it also won't be hard for us the same way leaving Outlook or Windows would. But if someone comes a long with viable EU alternatives to Azure, then we're likely going to jump on them. Not because we dislike Azure, but because the bureaucratic measures which force us to maintain these "you need to get out in a day" plans is a lot of work. It also limits us in the services we want to buy, we were looking into the Azure managed Kubernetes product that I forgot the name of, but we decided it wouldn't be a good idea because of how much work it would add for us to plan for an exit that will likely never come. I'm sure that last part has a lot of you rolling eyes. It has us rolling eyes too, but it's the world we live in, and it's not going to change. With the war in the Ukraine, the troubles with China and the risk of America electing another EU-unfriendly president/government, it's likely only going to accelerate, and someone, maybe even this Swedish initiative, are going to be the company or organization, that eventually gets the EU cloud alternative right. I think it'll be more a matter of timing and luck, than being able to actually compete with AWS or Azure in terms of services though. I think it's unrealistic for someone to build an AWS, but it won't be unrealistic to build something that's enough AWS and convenient as legislation pushes harder and harder.

What I'm personally curious about is to see what they plan on doing with smartphones. In Denmark your iPhone is your payment tool, your drivers licence, your social security license, you passport, your national digital ID, your bank and so on, and I'm not sure how the EU plans on having an European smartphone to rival Apple or Google.