I have been covering the European cloud computing market a little bit here at Cloud Ave. One of the reasons for the failure of public cloud providers in that market is the strict privacy laws that requires the cloud providers to keep the data within the borders. Even though AWS has support for EU region, there are no widespread adoption of AWS because different countries within the European Union have different regulations with respect to their data security and privacy.
Especially in Europe, there are strict privacy laws which will ensure the presence of local cloud players or global players with infrastructure within the boundaries of Europe. Even within Europe, different countries have different requirements in terms of compliance and other regulations.
Almost all of the big cloud providers are facing difficulty in the European market due to the diverse regulatory requirements by different countries. Such requirements adversely affect various players and they are now swinging into action to streamline the requirements.
Some European governments are wary of private companies, particularly U.S. ones, controlling so much information about their citizens and are resisting plans to harmonize the rules. Germany has been at the forefront in this respect, insisting on its right to impose tough national standards.
We have already discussed the requirements put forward by Germany and how it is opening up opportunities for regional cloud players. Even though the proliferation of smaller level players is good for a competitive marketplace, prohibiting bigger players like Amazon, Google and others due to strict data storage regulations will hurt badly. The move to lobby the 27-nation bloc in Europe for single set of rules for cloud computing is a very good move.
[...] July of this year, cloud vendors in Europe lobbied the EU block to have uniform regulations all around the EU. A single set of regulations in EU is very much [...]