Europe must seize its opportunity in the cloud market

Europe needs to work on its own cloud infrastructure to counterbalance the American hegemony. Moreover, it offers opportunities to make data centers more sustainable and to gain more sovereignty in the European cloud market.

That is the argument of Daan Terpstra, who works at the SDIA foundation. During the IT Infra event he will give a give a lecture around this theme. Terpstra says: “My story is about the fact that in Europe we are dependent on three major cloud providers: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. They have a completely vertical business model, where they own the data centers, the servers and the fiber, and all the services that are delivered via their racks. That creates an imbalance between the platform providers and the (end) users. By building a European alternative again, you could restore that balance of power.”

That is why Europe needs to get to work, says Terpstra: “One of the ways in which the EU is looking at this problem is, for example, the GAIA-X project. That comes down to developing a European equivalent of the services of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. You can compare that to the European Airbus project. This idea is not ideal because it focuses on only one part of the problem. You do get a European entity, but the balance of power and aspects around sustainability and transparency are not yet guaranteed.”

That's where the work of the SDIA foundation begins, he says: "Our idea is precisely to eliminate flaws in the design, given that we are lagging behind, and to develop an open source alternative cloud solution that gives more power to the end user. That reduces platform dependency and creates more competition, as opposed to the lock-in of the American providers."

This endeavor will require a lot of perseverance from the market, says Terpstra: “Amazon gives away a lot of credits to startups, which allows them to use their services almost for free. But it will be difficult for those companies to change platforms in the long term. SDIA wants to build a cloud for the local startup community, together with regional partners in Amsterdam and Oslo. We use sustainable energy, refurbished hardware and Kubernetes as a container layer. That should become a real alternative for the big boys.”

We can't do without data centers. But we can do without data centers that consume so much space, so much electricity and water. For that, we have developed a roadmap that must be solved by 2030. We have steering groups to come to a solution across the chain."

During his lecture from 10:15 to 10:45, Terpstra will delve deeper into this theme.