Hybrid cloud is booming, but where are European providers?

Almost everyone has a mix of public cloud and on-prem these days, but Computing research finds European players are virtually absent

The hybrid cloud model is extremely prevalent these days, and mostly the result of a deliberate policy to comply with data protection regulations or to work around legacy infrastructure that cannot easily be shifted to the cloud.

In fact, in a recent Computing survey of IaaS/PaaS users, only 18% said they were not using a hybrid cloud setup, meaning a combination of virtualised on-premises infrastructure and a public cloud service. Among larger organisations (1,000+) that number dropped to 6%.

Are you pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy?

Base: 171 UK IT leaders

So what clouds are they using? Those who have tracked Computing's research over the years will know that despite AWS being the largest cloud services provider in global terms, in the UK Microsoft tends to be the default choice for a great many organisations.

Which of the following vendors' IaaS/PaaS solutions do you use?

Once again, Azure was top of the pile followed by AWS then Google Cloud - the "big three". Ex-big three member IBM fell down the rankings this time, winding up in seventh place from fifth this time last year. This is surprising in some ways, since IBM's purchase of OpenShift was a big bet on the hybrid cloud model, which as we've seen is pretty much the default.

This year's big climber was another company that's gone big on hybrid - Oracle. For Oracle reps, it must make a pleasant change to be seen as the good guys - they've certainly made some friends in cloud.

"Slick, efficient and reliable," "Good pricing model for Oracle databases," "Cloud services better than other suppliers," "Excellent customer and support services," and "Rock solid" were all accolades thrown Oracle Cloud's way. Oracle Cloud probably makes most sense for companies that are already Oracle customers, but there is a large number of those.

Another cloud service designed for hybrid cloud is VMware on AWS, which had its fans among enterprise VMware users - again, there are a great many of those. VMware has developed several tools to ease the job of cloud migration, and this was very much appreciated.

"[It's the] ease of migration from on-prem VMware," "Easy upgrade path from on-prem" and "Good toolset," were representative remarks.

AWS and Azure are widely used and appreciated for their wide coverage with everything under one roof, but they are not universally popular. Respondents complained about confusing pricing and licencing, the lack of a personal touch, complexity and of course lock-in. These services certainly have their critics.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud users mentioned its ease of use, competent data services and nice dashboards, but detractors said its cloud has a smaller range of options, is behind the leaders in areas such as serverless compute, and that there's a constant worry about Google's tendency to drop services with little warning.

"They keep threatening to pull the plug on cloud," said an IT architect at a large consultancy.

Whither European clouds?

Which brings us to a conundrum. Given the high cloud costs, worries about lock-in, increasing regulation around data sovereignty, where are the UK and European clouds? When GDPR came out in 2018 and with the collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield data transfer regulations, many predicted a golden age for European cloud companies - but it just hasn't happened.

The EU's own cloud project GaiaX is reportedly mired in bureaucracy and squabbling, and European cloud companies such as Deutsche Telekom and Hetzner were nowhere to be seen - and we did ask. The only vendors that featured were SAP, which again has a presence thanks to its enterprise software, and France's OVH.

It seems European players don't usually get a look in. While they are doing quite well financially, their market share is tiny. Amazon, Microsoft and Google clouds accounted for 69% of the market in 2021. Europe's biggest cloud player, Deutsche Telekom, could manage only 2%.

This was something OVH's CEO Michel Paulin complained about on the pages of Computing recently. "There are many start-ups, and in the UK you have a lot of very active start-ups. It's a shame that in the end, they're all bought by hyperscalers because they have more money than the local players," he said.

In another article, Jan Oetgen of the European netID Foundation said, "It should concern us greatly that only a handful of companies dominate this space, and they all originate from one country."

Tobi Knaup, CEO of cloud native firm D2iQ, believes it's about their about origins. Microsoft, Amazon and Google, as well as being household names, built their clouds on the infrastructure they were using to run their own companies which was already proven at scale, whereas OVH started off as a colocation and managed service provider.

"I think that's why those US based cloud providers have been able to create superior offerings, frankly, because, they knew how to solve a lot of these problems themselves internally for their own services," Knaup said.

Does a cloud provider's sustainability claims influence your decision to use their services?

European cloud providers should perhaps focus more on areas where they have an advantage, such as privacy and data protection concerns, and also sustainability, an area that a growing number of IT leaders says informs their choice, and where the US giants, despite acres of marketing with green hills and solar panels, are extremely reluctant to publish hard data.

Join us online on 22nd February for Deskflix: Hybrid & Multi-cloud where more results of this research will be revealed.