What is the EUs Cloud Sovereignty Framework and will it be enough?

Date:
Fri, 04 Sep 2026 11:03:12 +0000

Description:
Europe's digital dependence on US cloud providers is under scrutiny and the EU is finally acting on it.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Chips from Taiwan, oil from the Persian Gulf, and cars from Germany what was long taken for granted is now being called into question all over the world. Where markets and expertise
are concentrated among a few providers, enormous economies of scale arise.

At the same time, however, dependencies also grow often with risks that only become apparent when supplies fail, prices rise, demand evolves, policies change, or individual players begin to monopolize the market. Take AI, for example according to research institute, Epoch AI, only two notable AI
models have emerged in Europe over the past twenty years compared to 50 in
the US and 30 in China. The technology has moved so quickly that the repercussions of this imbalance are only just beginning to be felt in
European markets. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: Dr. Thomas King Social Links Navigation

CTO of DE-CIX. Is Europe becoming too dependent? From office applications to storage and computing resources to software , what providers deliver from their data centers in a highly scalable, maximally available, and extremely innovative manner does not, in most cases, originate from the European continent.

According to Bitkoms Cloud Report 2026, roughly 85% of German companies consider Germany to be too dependent on US providers, and almost two thirds
of local users (64%) feel compelled to review their own IT strategy due to US government policy. Countries like France are already taking action, with the French government announcing plans to replace Windows with Linux on its government computers. You may like Why Europe cannot let the AI sovereignty ship sail Zscalers Casper Klynge on the question of European sovereignty, the transatlantic relationship, and the future of AI EU reveals new plans to cut reliance on US and Chinese tech

At the same time, the national health insurance fund has already migrated 80,000 employees from Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Dropbox to its own alternatives.

Whether in Germany or France, the question of how digitally dependent companies, governments, and societies are on individual suppliers is being asked throughout Europe. And it has been for some time. While Gaia-X focused on common standards for sovereign cloud computing , the EU is now pursuing a more pragmatic approach. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up
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The Cloud Sovereignty Framework (CSF), unveiled in October 2025, aims to make digital sovereignty measurable. To achieve this, it builds on initiatives
such as Gaia-X as well as regulations like DORA and NIS2, with the ultimate goal of being able to prioritize compliant, low-risk providers in public procurement. The sovereignty metric score Controlling and regionally consolidating ones own digital traffic flows. Thats quite a task in a world where AI superpowers are evolving overseas. With regard to IT supply chains, the framework favors providers who operate their environments in a transparent, resilient, and sufficiently sovereign manner to ensure that systems are protected from external influences or the interests of third parties.

This means, for example, that data paths must be traceable and controllable
at the regional level to ensure they remain within the EU legal framework. In other words, there is no sovereign cloud without an interconnection strategy. After all, Internet Exchanges (IXs) already play a key role when it comes to processing bits and bytes locally. Wherever companies, networks, and clouds connect at IXs, they exchange information along paths that can be precisely defined geographically. What to read next Is sovereignty threatening your resilience? Keeping your options open: Why choice matters for UK AI sovereignty Data sovereignty is more than a pin on a map

Although the EU does not explicitly make IXs a scoring criterion, its heavily implied. For example, the CSF also evaluates cloud services based on supply chain-related legal, operational, and technological objectives. This concept is also reflected in the NIS2 Directive and argues in favor of more decentralized and resilient backbones, such as mutually secured interconnection platforms, such as IXs.

In practical terms, this means that any IT landscape is only as secure as the individual elements that comprise it. So, if all partners design the components they provide to others with multiple layers of redundancy, the overall system becomes not only more reliable but also more independent for everyone.

Distributed and provider-neutral IXs have already made this principle their guiding philosophy: to allow data to be exchanged with high availability, security, and control between all companies, partners, and clouds within the digital ecosystem. Europe at a crossroads Technical issues can usually be resolved easily, but legal ones often cannot. Therefore, the CSF is unlikely to revolutionize the European cloud market overnight, but it can steer public demand in a targeted manner. As a result, hybrid, multi-cloud, and
on-premises approaches are becoming more important, and IT is becoming infinitely more complex.

While unravelling this complexity will take additional effort, the pay-off of rearchitecting networks around neutral IXs will be a two for one: not only will it reduce long-term lock-in risks but will also reduce the threat of having to pay significantly higher prices later on when things inevitably change. Europe must now consciously accept this and align and strengthen its own provider market accordingly.

Just as operations would come to a standstill for 46% of companies in a prolonged outage, without the cloud, there can be no functional public administration and no independent, sovereign, and thus capable state. We've featured the best cloud storage. This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives , our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit



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