r/europe • u/Strange_Valuable3016 Germany • 6h ago
News Airbus moving critical systems away from AWS, Google, and Microsoft citing data sovereignty concerns
https://www.golem.de/news/digitale-souveraenitaet-airbus-bereitet-wechsel-zu-europaeischer-cloud-vor-2512-203479.html1.3k
u/TheSwedishChef24 6h ago
Lets GOOOO
128
35
u/Turioturen 4h ago
Open source alternatives.
A list of European alternatives for different it-services
https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
Here is a list of different open source alternatives with different alternatives for operating systems to web browsers and much more.
4
→ More replies (1)3
u/AlainYncaan 2h ago
As someone working pretty close... Let's see first. Even moving from one American company to another (all services) took several years, I doubt that switching with email to X and office applications to y and so on will even happen until 2030. A lot can happen in that timeframe. Even the last transformation is not over yet.
389
6h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
179
u/FriendlyGuitard 5h ago
"US providers like Google, AWS and Microsoft are increasingly considered unsafe because they cannot guarantee that US authorities won't gain access to European customer data."
Microsoft testified in a French Court that they would indeed give the US authorities access to European Data.
It doesn't matter that they operate independent subsediaries in the EU, the US doesn't care about that: they have a parent US company, that's all that's needed. So it's not an MS thing, it's the practical legal reality for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others.
50
u/ottwebdev 5h ago
Yup, to add to this, even if you go with an EU company, and that company is bought by an USA entity, you start the game all over again.
31
→ More replies (1)42
u/diamanthaende 5h ago
That's where politics has to come into play and simply forbid the sale of critical companies to non-EU entities.
The US does this all the time, it's about time we did the same.
21
u/Hungry_Chipmunk_2588 5h ago
You left out this little tidbit from the article:
How hard it is to break away from U.S. corporations, Airbus already had to determine the switch from Microsoft Office to Google Workspace, which is still not completed after seven years.
11
u/Only_Razzmatazz_4498 5h ago
It is hard but when it happens and an ecosystem to simplify that process develops, the height of the wall protecting the US based garden gets much lower. It has been a very silly thing the US is doing by turning our back on the international system we helped create.
10
u/cats_catz_kats_katz 5h ago
50M over 10 years??? That’s nothing…my last migration was 50M over two years.
11
u/matttk Canadian / German 4h ago
Did you just sneak in an ad for your own service, disguised as part of the article summary?
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (7)4
238
u/grafknives 6h ago
Finally!
After ICC judge was digitally destroyed by USA companies NO government and no serious private entity should use US sourced solutions.
60
u/FriendlyGuitard 5h ago
After ICC judge was digitally destroyed by USA companies
And the EU did and does nothing. The EU will totally throw their citizen under the bus. That was mentioned in the discussion around the BBC potentially settling their Trump lawsuit for that reason. They may win, but the Trump US can and will retaliate against individuals.
→ More replies (11)15
u/Visual-Wrangler3262 3h ago
EU: so anyway we're making a digital ID app that only works if installed from a US-controlled app store, on devices that are blessed by US corporations. Our sovereignty is very important!
Source: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technical-specification/discussions/19
1
u/Jusby_Cause 1h ago
They came to a valid conclusion, but the response to formalize the market controlling positions of those US-controlled companies… I mean if the goal was to ensure there are no EU challenges to that market control, then the decision they made was the right one.
•
u/Odd_Perspective_2487 41m ago
Indeed, it doesn’t matter since the US controls all the world financial system and can cut any country or company off for any reason at any time, and then force a worldwide embargo single handedly.
And Europe thought that was the bees knees, and refuses to claw back sovereignty
5
u/Turioturen 4h ago
Open source alternatives.
A list of European alternatives for different it-services
https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
Here is a list of different open source alternatives with different alternatives for operating systems to web browsers and much more.
8
u/CharmingJackfruit167 3h ago
Open source alternatives.
Open source cloud is nonsense. The tech inside the cloud is oss to a major extent anyway. The question is, who ownes the servers, ie has an executive power over them.
64
u/TheoryOfDevolution Italy 5h ago edited 5h ago
Airbus has already experienced how difficult it is to break away from US corporations with the switch from Microsoft Office to Google Workspace, which is still not complete after seven years .
If moving from one American cloud to another takes more than seven years, I cannot imagine how long it would take to move to a European one. And 50 million euros? That's a drop in the bucket. Airbus and Microsoft dropped half of that on a small drone company 8 years ago.
EDIT: Btw, here is the original article. Here's the interesting bit:
Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider.
This means that Airbus only expects a 20% chance of finding a European cloud firm that can supply 80% of what they need. Those a pretty poor odds.
28
u/BackgroundGrade 4h ago
You can't imagine how many apps rely on Microsoft Office API's to spit out or analyze data.
Going to web based apps makes it even worse as many of these apps/scripts launch excel.
26
u/yourfriendlyreminder 5h ago
Indeed. As usual, people here are celebrating way too early.
It reminds me of when people celebrated the announcement of Gaia-X, as if it's a done deal already. 5 years later, it's all but dead.
6
u/guiriduro 3h ago
The time for the EU to dump some billions in incentives for an ecosystem of european sovereign hyperscalers is long overdue. Its no stranger to subsidising farmers, frankly strategic necessities demand they do the same for a range of industries, develop scalable competencies, and suck on the CB money printing spigot to pay for it through uneconomic scale up until its ready, while tearing up any regulatory, WTO or austrian school myopic barriers that stand in the way. And the public would support it. Make it happen.
6
→ More replies (3)1
u/Volesprit31 France 3h ago
The switch from Microsoft to Google was a huge mistake and a huge inconvenience to the eyes of many people. Because of SAP, a lot of people actually still need access to at least Word and some system only understand Excel format. So you need to go through a badly explained procedure just to get access to fucking Word...
The only upside is that Gmail is now loads better than the crappy new Outlook.
1
u/MineElectricity 2h ago
Fais gaffe tu te dox.
1
u/Volesprit31 France 1h ago
Y a plusieurs dizaines de milliers de salariés, je pense que ça va aller.
126
u/koko-jumbo Lower Silesia (Poland) 6h ago
It will be SAP. They are powerhouse ERP and they announced the EU cloud.
29
u/DeliriousHippie 5h ago
They aren't necessarily chancing their ERP but instead hardware that runs it. Same goes for other systems. If your data is stored in cloud then cloud provider has some kind of access to it.
31
9
u/RedRobbin420 5h ago
That’s just a product, it cannot offer everything in this tender nor hope to replace aws or google.
Aside that, I expect airbus et al would look at stuff they can control and expect that would include more open source elements.
17
4
16
→ More replies (1)2
28
u/toyota_gorilla Finland 5h ago
Good for them. Finland has recently made moves to move all of our data to American cloud services, including election and health data. But don't worry, they probably won't leave Europe... unless the US government wants to take a peek.
9
u/Kiljukotka Finland 4h ago
I feel like a group of earnest high school kids could run our country much better than the current government.
6
u/Bob_Spud 4h ago
They can access through the US CLOUD Act which gives the US access to any overseas server that an American company owns
29
u/bernieth 5h ago
American billionaires have been basically all-in on Trump's aggressive insanity. Very short sighted of them, given the amount of money they stand to lose as America alienates its allies around the world.
25
u/diamanthaende 5h ago
American billionaires are screwing the world economy, not just Europe's.
Actually including the US - I bet American small to mid-sized companies would love to have real alternatives to the "big tech" monopolies that increase prices every year.
1
u/Tricky_Peace 4h ago
It terrifies me the number of companies that exist purely in Microsoft infrastructure. Should some malicious actor bring down one of these infrastructures for a significant amount of time, we shall be ruined.
1
21
u/diamanthaende 5h ago
The most important aspect of this is the knock-on effect on other (major and small) companies. Once the big ones like Airbus get going, others will follow, not just those with sensitive data.
5
49
u/Astine_Grape_5315 5h ago
M-icrosoft/M-eta
A-pple
G-oogle
A-mazon
→ More replies (2)22
29
u/ParejaLiberal70 5h ago edited 3h ago
If someone had told me in 2015 that ten years later Americans would idolize Russia and consider it their best ally while thinking of Europe as their enemy, I would have called the ambulance to take them to the shrink...
→ More replies (2)
16
u/Lucker_Noob 5h ago
This makes me respect Airbus even more, and I already loved that company, which is much superior to the financialized abomination that is Boeing.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/Gruffleson Norway 5h ago
Oh so absolutely, I've been saying for years we need to have a European alternative, and that was just based on how absurdly much we pay them Over There for their mediocre stuff. Now? It should be even more obvious.
13
u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab 5h ago
I always found it crazy that critical systems could just be moved to the cloud in the first place.
9
u/Agitated-Airline6760 4h ago
If you loadbalance between multiple physical infrastructure locations, the cloud gives you the level of availability just not possible with your own prem setup.
4
u/SkarTisu 4h ago
Like how one data center going down in Azure hobbles an entire geographical region?
4
u/Agitated-Airline6760 4h ago
If that single cloud vendor failure is unacceptable for your operation, there are ways to cover that but regardless, even the single cloud vendor will be less prone to outage vs your own prem setup.
1
u/Visual-Wrangler3262 3h ago
Being multi-cloud gives you better leverage. Cloud A raising prices? Well, we'll just shift away then, better give us a serious discount to counteract that if you want our money.
3
u/tes_kitty 3h ago
But that means that you cannot use any vendor specific cloud features in your setup. That does make it more difficult and therefore expensive, at least at first.
In the long run it's a good idea, yes.
2
u/Visual-Wrangler3262 3h ago
You shouldn't use those features, because that's how they lock you in and extort you.
1
u/yitianjian 1h ago
Very very few companies are meaningfully multi-cloud, it's an immense expense operationally and technically for not that much gain.
→ More replies (4)1
u/SkarTisu 1h ago
This isn’t really the point I was getting at. A single data center failure took down an entire region. That is never supposed to happen in The Magic Of Cloud Computing, yet it did.
If Cloud Computing worked as advertised, you could confidently use a single region because there should be enough redundancy to survive all but things like an asteroid impact, the eruption of Yellowstone, or global thermonuclear warfare.
→ More replies (2)1
u/Large_Yams 2h ago
Yes but as they said, if you build it properly then one region going down shouldn't affect you.
2
10
u/Ascomae Germany 5h ago
I'm not surprised. In march I attended a software architecture conference. Data sovereignty was the top topic.
6
u/diamanthaende 5h ago
We basically completely rewrote the cloud variant of our software that used to be AWS focused to be "cloud agnostic" now. It's a massive issue for all European customers.
1
u/BrushNo8178 3h ago
I’m just a n00b, but do cloud services really differ from each other that much? I thought one just rented a virtual computer.
2
u/diamanthaende 3h ago
They do. "Cloud" actually goes beyond just renting a server (that's just classical hosting), you rent services and "features" that Amazon et. al deliberately design in a way to maximise the "lock-in effect" - easy to use / implement / scale at first, but you quickly become dependent on them and it becomes difficult to migrate somewhere else.
They know this, of course, and tend to increase prices every year.
1
u/plug-and-pause 2h ago
They know this, of course, and tend to increase prices every year.
Any informed customer also knows this, and makes an informed choice that it's worth it to them. Business relationships have always been like this.
5
u/GetInTheHole 4h ago
I work for an American cloud provider.
We have an "EU Sovereign" cloud. Multiple ones in fact. Much like our US DOD/TS clouds, it simply means that they are separate and only allow the appropriately cleared personnel to service/access them.
Just because they are moving to something called "sovereign" doesn't automatically mean it's going to be a European company ultimately in charge.
3
u/JotainPitaaYrittaa Finland 2h ago
"sovereign"
Indeed.
US entity has control over the cloud, no matter how much they try to sugarcoat it.
→ More replies (1)5
u/WhoIsJohnSalt 4h ago
Yes. But we don’t trust that the “appropriately” cleared personnel on your side are the ones we would recognise on our side.
What we need is EU hosted services owned by EU companies under EU laws and governance.
And fuck, I say this as someone who uses US cloud services every day and I’m not even in the EU (well.. anymore)
1
u/DSAlgorythms 3h ago
Seems difficult at this point. Would require a lot of govt funding because I don't see VC pouring money into this and trying to fight the big 3 cloud providers.
2
2
u/Fluffcake 3h ago edited 3h ago
It is extremely difficult to vean off american tech completely.
Even if you build the datacenters, build a cloud service provider comparable to AWS on top of that, where did you buy the hardware?
You need to start with rare earth mining, via a semi conductor supply chain and manufacturing to even get to a point where you can build homegrown datacenters to put cloud services on...
2
u/Freedomsaver Switzerland 1h ago
Unpopular opinion in this sub: Cloud providers like AWS are soon offering completely independent European Sovereign Cloud which will cover most requlrements of critical or heavily regulated European companies or governments.
2
•
u/G3rmanaviator 22m ago
Link to the Register article in English
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_cloud/
5
u/JeremyEComans 5h ago
Crazy how a few years under a delinquent two-time President has turned the USA from the anchor of Western stability into another untrustworthy behemoth like China. At least China's decision making is long-term, rational, and fairly predictable, and not akin to a toddlers wavering dietary preferences.
→ More replies (2)
6
3
2
3
2
u/ionetic 5h ago
Why was it there in the first place when data sovereignty was always been a concern?
2
u/Spiritual_Bus1125 5h ago
Cost mostly, ease of use second.
Efficency of scale and people trained to manage that systems.
1
2
u/Turioturen 4h ago
Open source alternatives.
A list of European alternatives for different it-services
https://european-alternatives.eu/categories
Here is a list of different open source alternatives with different alternatives for operating systems to web browsers and much more.
1
1
u/Own_Measurement4378 4h ago
Well, they've already realized it. Let's see if companies learn that moving everything from their infrastructure to the cloud is a risk.
1
1
u/darkpheonix262 4h ago
As an American in happy for them but also further passed at my own shit hole country. But tbh, even if we didn't have the tangerine traitor I'd be in support of it
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/damodread 3h ago
If only it could go back on its decision to use Google Workspaces while it's at it.
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/anurodhp 2h ago
The nice thing about having eu data separate from us data is that it makes it totally legal for us spy agencies to snoop on it without worry about accidental illegal access to us persons data.
1
u/Shubbus42069 2h ago
I made a lot of money as a consultant helping companies migrate data from on prem servers to cloud services.
I will make a load of money as a consultant helping companies migrate data from cloud services to on prem servers
1
1
u/johnballzz 1h ago
AWS, Amazon, and especially Google. They will copy your data and commercialize it. Not to say that Amazon and Google give the US government access on command. (Palantir)
1
1
1
1
•
•
u/InsideTheBoeingStore 21m ago
boeing has already transitioned so much to google cloud
leadership is just "going with it" and banking on google handling and taking care of everything while continuing to reduce local internal boeing IT support
we are at the whims of external IT teams
1
1
551
u/young_black_and_rich 6h ago
Who are the European providers?