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Bloomberg
Amazon.com Inc cast doubt over a Franco-German plan for a European cloud that would allow the continent’s businesses to keep their data from being stored in the US or China.
After the European Union’s (EU) two leading nations unveiled plans for an EU-focussed cloud, a spokesperson for Amazon’s AWS cloud business said such a project will lack the scale to compete with the industry’s dominant players.
“We think that the idea of a ‘national’ cloud is interesting in theory, but in reality it removes many of the fundamental benefits of cloud computing,” the spokesperson said. “Running technology infrastructure at the scale that we do at AWS is hard and a capital-intensive business, in which customer demands for innovation and the latest security tools are insatiable.
This is also why the many proposals we have seen for “national†clouds over the years have not been seriously pursued.”
With concerns mounting about both data security and the economic importance of big data, France and Germany are striving to give their companies an alternative to storing data with US or Asian rivals such as Amazon or Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
They announced they will work together to build a “secure data infrastructure†and promised more detailed plans by the end of the year.
The move comes as Amazon’s AWS is racing for dominance in Europe and Alibaba is pushing to enter the market. Domestic competitors by comparison are struggling to gain critical mass.
The use of cloud services is expanding rapidly and the technology will soon provide the architecture for everything from healthcare services to mining financial data.
Europe needs its own cloud infrastructure to ensure confidential data doesn’t leave the region, Tim Hoettges, chief executive officer of Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s most valuable telecom company, said at a tech conferencein Cologne.
US players have been making huge investments to stay ahead of the game in cloud services. Alphabet Inc has signaled it’s ready to dent its earnings to invest in the cloud, while Microsoft Corp is likely to get a boost from the $10 billion contract it won to run the Pentagon’s cloud.