‘This is geopatriation, not cloud repatriation’ – Gartner

Analyst Rene Buest tells CRN more than half of Western European IT leaders will switch to local cloud providers

Parts of Europe plan to shun hyperscalers over geopolitics and over reliance on US cloud providers.

New figures from Gartner found that 61 per cent of Western European CIOs and IT leaders said geopolitical factors will increase their reliance on local or regional cloud providers.

The analyst house surveyed 241 decision makers in the region from May to July 2025 to determine their cloud-related technology purchases and adoption.

Amid ongoing geopolitical tensions, Western European organisations are increasingly worried about their digital sovereignty – having their data, operations, and technology hosted by foreign cloud providers and relying on foreign cloud infrastructure.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, more than 75 per cent of all enterprises outside the US will have a digital sovereignty strategy, supported by a sovereign cloud strategy.

Results also showed that 53 per cent of respondents said geopolitics will restrict their organisations’ future use of global cloud providers (see Figure 1).

Rene Buest, senior director analyst at Gartner tells CRN if any US hyperscalers are likely to take a hit as a result.

“It’s already Microsoft,” he says.

“Across Europe, public sector organisations especially are moving away from Microsoft.”

According to Buest, German state Schleswig-Holstein, the Danish digitalisation agency, the city of Lyon in France and the Austrian army are abandoning Microsoft, and in some cases moving over to open-source.

The research also found that 53 per cent of respondents said open-source technologies will be an important factor in their future cloud strategies.

While the Dutch parliament plans to build a national cloud to reduce dependencies, and the EU Commission is revisiting its cloud contracts.

“So it’s currently Microsoft feeling the pain, but it’s more on the Software as a Service layer and not so much on the infrastructure side,” Buest adds.

The UK, however, seems unphased by sovereignty concerns.

“From a data standpoint, what we’re seeing in the UK is the opposite,” the Gartner analyst says.

“I think the UK is less concerned than the rest of Europe, because the ties from a technology adoption profile are very close between the US and the UK.

“Typically, a US provider expands into Europe from the UK first because of the language.”

‘This is geopatriation’

The topic of cloud repatriation has been gaining momentum in the IT space.

In August, CRN heard from eight channel partners who shared insights from concerned customers on the growing dependency on a small number of providers.

But Gartner has given this trend a more fitting name to what it believes is happening in the market - geopatriation.

“We call this trend geopatriation, moving away from a hyperscaler to a local or regional cloud provider.

“This is not repatriation. That would mean returning to private or local cloud environments,” Buest explains.

“It depends on the workload. For example, with Office 365, there aren’t many alternatives.

“So what we see is that they are doing it in their own datacentres, or they are working with smaller local cloud providers, which are also not so popular.”

Buest adds that one axiom of cloud storage is that it is unfair to compare the portfolios of US hyperscalers against the European options.

“But I have spoken to several Gartner clients recently who have started with an assessment to see if it is possible to decrease their dependency on hyperscalers,” he continues.

“In doing so they have realised they are not using so many specific services that only exist with hyperscalers, and are just using the basic infrastructure services they can get from other local and regional providers.”