The cloud sovereignty nexus: How the European Union seeks to reverse strategic dependencies in its digital ecosystem

Abstract

AbstractHow does the European Union balance the need to migrate data to the cloud with the imperative of reducing its dependence on foreign cloud providers? Cloud computing is a critical technology for the competitiveness of the European Union (EU) in the digital economy. This paper argues that the EU is adopting a host of regulatory requirements and industrial policy tools—which fall under the umbrella term of ‘data sovereignty’—not only to protect the confidentiality of European data, but also to counter the dominance of US vendors in the European cloud market. To demonstrate how data sovereignty principles are woven into current EU policy initiatives, the paper presents two case studies: Gaia‐X and the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge, and Cloud. Linking data sovereignty to the lack of a competitive European cloud ecosystem sheds light on the strategic dimension of cloud computing in a way that treating them separately would not do.