Three questions and answers: How to forge your escape plan from the US cloud
The erratic US government is creating great uncertainty as to whether hyperscalers can still be trusted. But what is the key to getting out of the US clouds?
The dependency of their own IT on US services is currently under scrutiny in many companies. Naturally, there are fears that the Trump administration could abuse the supremacy of US tech companies as political leverage. The fact that Microsoft blocked the email account of the chief prosecutor of the International Court of Justice following US sanctions gives a foretaste of what could happen in a worst-case scenario. Martin Gerhard Loschwitz, cover author of the new iX 6/2025, explains how to tackle your own declaration of independence from US services.
US hyperscalers currently dominate the market because they offer advantages such as convenience, scalability and an enormous range of functions and services. Can European providers keep up with the US competition?
Honestly: No. There is no company in Europe that offers a range of functions comparable to AWS or Azure. But that doesn't change the problem: even the best features won't help me if the provider slams the door in my face under pressure from above. What's more, AWS, Azure & GCP offer an incredible number of functions. But only a fraction of the setups that run there actually need them. Database-as-a-Service is also offered by European clouds, for example, as well as standard IaaS or PaaS. And for the much-cited Microsoft 365, there are now several European alternatives that deal with mail, groupware and collaboration in a meaningful way, such as OnlyOffice.
Providers such as OVH, Cleura, Stackit, the Open Telekom Cloud and others have very well-functioning solutions in their portfolios for the majority of functions that the average European company needs. And unlike the US hyperscalers, with these providers I am not making my company dependent on a company in a country with a rabid government.
What should companies that are planning their exit from the US cloud look out for?
The most important task is to assess your needs. Which functions do I actually use, which European providers have a valid alternative in their program, how much effort is involved in the migration? Of course, those who have already largely automated and orchestrated their hyperscaler setup have an advantage here. This is because the actual effort involved is significantly less than if you have to set up a setup completely manually on another platform. Tools such as Terraform help enormously here.
It is also important to start planning in good time. Migrating away from the hyperscaler is no walk in the park and certainly not a sure-fire success. It becomes particularly unpleasant if you actually have to do without services offered in the US cloud. This often concerns special databases that are not available outside the cloud. Here, too, the motto must be to look around for valid alternatives at an early stage and, if necessary, to think outside the box. This is associated with financial and non-material expenditure, but ultimately frees your own company from a subcontractor that you cannot simply terminate.
In which cases is the move particularly easy and where can you expect a lot of pain?
Classic IaaS applications, for example, can be easily implemented in almost any public cloud in Europe. Container-based workloads based on Kubernetes also pose no challenge, as Kubernetes-as-a-Service is also available from various European providers. Things get a little trickier with other as-a-service functions, such as the DBaaS described above. Not every provider has its own cloud service for every database.
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Things get really awkward when services are used that only exist specifically with a single provider and are adapted to the respective applications. Aurora from AWS or BigQuery from Google are examples of this. Anyone using these services has in fact already made a serious mistake in advance because they have made their company dependent on an external service provider at a central point and have thus exposed themselves to a total vendor lock-in.
Martin, thank you very much for your answers! An overview of the move of IaaS and PaaS services from the US hyperscaler to Europe can be found in the new iX. We also show what a blueprint for a sovereign enterprise architecture can look like – and take a look at what Europe has to offer in terms of public cloud. Readers can find all this and much more in the June issue, which is now available in the heise Shop or at newsagents.
In the "Three questions and answers" series, iX aims to get to the heart of today's IT challenges – regardless of whether it is the user's view in front of the PC, the manager's view or the everyday life of an administrator. Do you have any suggestions from your day-to-day work or that of your users? Whose tips on which topic would you like to read in a nutshell? Then please write to us or leave a comment in the forum.
(axk)
