Europa Cloud? Too little, too late …

The “Handelsblatt”, a leading German business newspaper, this week reported in its Schwerpunkt (focus) double-page spread that the German government is pushing ahead with plans to establish a Europa Cloud. On closer inspection, this sounds rather like pages rustling in the wind on a slow news day. The authors themselves actually write that the implementation of the government’s plans to strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty is “still at an early stage”. The Ministry of Trade and Industry is said to be discussing the topic with several companies. They also explain that this is “initially not about financial grants or subsidies”, but rather that the government “will provide conceptual impetus and place itself at the vanguard of a movement”. Further along in the text, Gartner analyst René Büst deflates the idea that other providers will ever be able to gain ground on the lead that huge providers of hyperscale platforms have opened up, not to mention that “building up a comparable platform is virtually impossible – the corporations have simply invested too much”. Amazon / AWS, Microsoft or Google invest billions of dollars every year in infrastructure and staff. Even if you have heard far too much toothless lip service being paid to Deutschland, German and all manner of other special clouds, ministers Altmaier and Seehofer certainly have a point that “European commerce urgently needs dependable data sovereignty and wide-ranging data availability and that we should “only work with providers that comply with our security guidelines to ensure that our digital sovereignty is guaranteed”. These do not necessarily have to be hyperscalers – why indeed roam so far afield when the answer lies as close to home as the proverbial backyard? Retarus, for instance, runs three of its six self-operated, audit-ready data centers on “the old continent”, provides support and consulting services in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, Italy and England, offers software developed in-house (provided as a service, of course), open standards and more than a quarter century of messaging experience. If you entrust your communication to us, you won’t have to give a second thought to the Cloud Act. You can find out more about Retarus’ Enterprise Cloud on our website or straight from your local Retarus representative.