WorldWide Europe Cloud Computing Market, Industry / Sector Analysis Report, Regional Outlook & Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019 - 2025 (Includes Business Impact of COVID-19)

                                          
Europe Cloud Computing Market is driven by the increasing number of data center clusters in the regions, particularly in France, Germany, and the UK. For instance, in January 2018, Microsoft opened four new data centers in France to meet the increased business needs of cloud computing. Similarly, in November 2016, IBM launched four new cloud data centers in the UK, helping businesses to innovate and respond to market demands more quickly and efficiently. Huge presence of data centers has increased the demand for infrastructure management platforms and tools. This also generates the need to use cloud computing to manage and consolidate such infrastructures. Organizations deploy these platforms to consume a compute resource, such as Virtual Machine (VM), application, or storage rather than building computing infrastructures in-house. Additional benefits that have fueled the adoption of cloud platforms include the elimination of massive investments in local infrastructure, self-service provisioning, workload resilience, and enables the easy migration of certain workloads to or from the cloud.

 

Furthermore, the Europe cloud computing market growth is also triggered by the support from various government-led initiatives. For instance, the European Commission has established the European Cloud Computing Strategy (ECCS) to promote the adoption of cloud computing services. The strategy’s objective is to create 3.8 million new jobs and help the GDP increase to 957 billion euros by 2020. In September 2017, the European cloud infrastructure providers have also accepted the proposed regulation on the Free Flow of Data in the EU. The proposed regulation is a major step for Europe’s cloud industry to create an integrated Digital Single Market.
 

Another factor accelerating the growth of the cloud computing market in Europe is the increasing trend of outsourcing cloud computing services. Companies are outsourcing cloud services to reduce the dependency on local servers and minimize the costs associated with handling and management of the infrastructure. However, data security has is one of the biggest concerns for the enterprises. As data is being collected and used on a massive scale, cloud platforms offer challenges in terms of protecting the personal data. As a result, in May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect and focused on the standardization of data protection laws in all EU countries. The regulation also provided strict guidelines for the companies that process and manage the data.
 

As per the deployment model, organizations are readily adopting hybrid cloud models to run their mission-critical applications and workloads on the private cloud and make use of public cloud services to handle complex tasks in demand. The increased interest in hybrid cloud is dictated by the desire to enhance business agility and improve the speed of deployment of applications.
 

The BFSI vertical has witnessed the heavy adoption of cloud technologies. In December 2017, the European Banking Federation launched             the EBF Cloud Banking Forum to support the deployment of cloud solutions in the banking sector. The Forum also supported an informed dialogue between banks and cloud service providers to deliver recommendations for supervisors regarding access rights and audits, pooled audits, life-cycle management, and reporting of outsourced activities.
 

Some of the leading European players operating in the cloud computing market are Amazon Web Services, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Dimension Data, Google Compute Engine, IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, OVH, Rackspace, 1&1, and CloudSigma. The cloud computing market players are laying more focus on strategic acquisitions to enhance their existing cloud capabilities. For instance, in July 2018, Orange acquired Basefarm Holding, a player in cloud infrastructure and critical application services in Europe. The acquisition reinforced the company’s position in the cloud computing services for the enterprise sector. Similarly, in September 2017, Rackspace acquired Datapipe to widen its geographic coverage in the Asia Pacific region and Europe, particularly in the UK. It also enabled the company to sell its migration and other services to large companies.