Sovereign cloud is only possible if you’re Chinese or American: Gartner

The analyst doesn’t think attempts to create sovereign clouds will succeed. He mentioned past French attempts to create sovereign clouds named “Andromeda”, “Numergy,” and “Gaia-X”, which he says went nowhere - but did produce some nice white papers.

The argument I would make here is that - even though France’s government always had an autonomous philosophy - the idea that relations between the US and France&Europe would become so sour wasn’t seen as realistic until very recent history.

So, any attempts to create an alternative when the current solutions were working just fine - and there weren’t any worries about US becoming antagonistic to European businesses & governments - would obviously be fighting an uphill battle.

But now the environment and context changed. The idea of needing an alternative is no longer seen as pointless or ludicrous. Several governments now want to have data sovereignty, unlike before. The new attempts will - I hope & expect - be more serious and committed than previous ones.

I’m not claiming that these new projects for data sovereignty are going to work out - I don’t know, I can’t predict the future - but I am saying that the context changed, so past attempts need to be seen through a different lens.

It’s easy, you can choose what China does, build a national firewall and blocked all other companies from oversea ;)