True tech sovereignty could be a bridge too far for Europe

Achieving true tech sovereignty could be a bridge too far for Europe, a senior Forrester analyst has told ITPro, as new research from the consultancy lays bare the scale of the challenge.

According to Forrester’s Global Sovereignty Forecast, the shift to bolster tech sovereignty will move “slowly over the next five years”, with many efforts to divest from US tech providers falling flat.

The report includes a ‘Tech Sovereignty Index’ used to measure a country’s ability to “develop, operate, and secure critical technologies independently” – and it paints a damning picture.

Between 2025 and 2030, European countries are only expected to make “modest” gains in building sovereignty. Germany’s score is expected to rise from 34% to just 36%, for example, while the UK from 30% to 32%.

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This slow progress flies in the face of what has become a key recurring talking point in Europe over the last 18 months. Calls have been rising to cut reliance on US-based technology providers, largely due to a combination of rising geopolitical tensions and data privacy concerns.

Speaking to ITPro, Dario Maisto, principal analyst and lead author of the report, suggested the current focus on sovereignty is much like other tech industry trends: awash by hype.

“There is a lot of hype around sovereignty, because service providers see it as the money maker,” he told ITPro. “So why should an organization engage with me? Well, sovereignty.”

For many organizations, Maisto noted that the focus on sovereignty isn’t actually required from a compliance perspective, albeit in some limited capacities.

“I was watching a Red Hat presentation in the morning, and they said there are a lot of new regulations. No, there’s not. There’s none. There is no new regulation that mandates sovereignty in any way whatsoever,” he said.

“Nor is there any definition at any possible level, national, regional, international, for sovereignty. There are some requirements in terms of data residency, citizenship of people handling certain workloads, certain workloads being deployed on on-prem rather than public cloud … but there is no formal, overarching obligation towards sovereignty whatsoever.”

“Persistent dependencies” run deep in Europe

Maisto admitted that geopolitical tensions, particularly deteriorating transatlantic ties, have indeed prompted a rethink of how heavily European organizations rely on US providers.

The idea of a wholesale shift away from popular vendors would require a monumental effort, however. Combined, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud control 65% of the European cloud market.

“There is not much that we can do about it. Certain SaaS applications, for example, do not even work outside of the hyperscalers clouds,” he said. “So you have two options as a client: either take the degraded, not complete, less serviced, less updated on-prem version, which you can, or you get the most updated, the fanciest, the shiniest cloud version.”

“But then you are forced to deploy on a hyperscaler because the APIs don’t work outside of the hyperscaler cloud. Moving these applications outside of the hyperscaler cloud, it’s not a lift and shift.

“It’s not something that the client can do.”

Elsewhere, Europe simply doesn’t have the capabilities when it comes to macroeconomic considerations. When gauging sovereignty credentials, Forrester’s index takes into account a range of factors, including:

Government spending
Tech workforce availability
Data center capacity and autonomy
Chip production
Rare earth elements processing
AI model creation

Forrester noted that “persistent dependences” in areas such as energy infrastructure, data center infrastructure, and supply chains could hamper the region’s ability to operate independently of both US and Chinese technology ecosystems.

Back down to earth

Maisto’s argument is that the reality of achieving true tech sovereignty often fails to acknowledge the significant investment required to reach this point – along with the potential disruption and legwork needed to move away from US-based providers.

“I think seven out of 10 international SaaS solutions are out of the US,” he said. “So how feasible is it that organizations replace 20 years of investment in Salesforce, in Workday, in ServiceNow overnight?”

Put simply, it’s an idealized vision borne out of the reactionary, tumultuous geopolitics at play in the world right now.

“So many people see sovereignty as a green field,” he said. “For organizations that have been investing millions, if not billions, in cloud migrations, task transformation, it’s not about greenfield. It’s a retrofit.”

These questions are what prompted the creation of what Maisto described as the “minimum viable sovereignty model” used in the Tech Sovereignty Index.

“How do I do the least possible investments now to get the sovereignty that I actually need, what is it I actually need to be compliant? Maybe to mitigate a risk, and what is it I can actually achieve?”

Lifting and shifting anyway

Despite the difficulties highlighted by Maisto, efforts to bolster sovereignty have been gaining traction across Europe over the last year. In April, authorities in France announced plans to move away from Windows in favor of Linux-based operating systems for some 2.5 million government devices.

Speaking at the time, David Amiel, minister of public action and accounts, said the country aims to become “less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny”.

At an EU-wide level, similar efforts are being made. As ITPro reported in June, the European Commission unveiled the technological sovereignty package.

This aims to reduce reliance on US tech and shake up the union’s capabilities across several areas, spanning AI, cloud computing, open source, and semiconductor manufacturing.

On the latter of these focus areas, Maisto noted that this is a “move in the right direction because we need more options” in terms of hardware manufacturing.

At present, Europe accounts for less than 10% of global chip manufacturing, according to Forrester. Crucially, it lacks the “large designers that can compete with the likes of Nvidia or Qualcomm”.

All told, European companies design only 1% of global chips.

Maisto suggested this once again shows the scale of the challenge faced both by individual European nations and the region as a whole under EU leadership.