European firms are reaching a new scale of public cloud usage, with 92% of companies in the UK, France and Germany saying they have adopted cloud computing, with 78% reporting they use a hybrid cloud, and 75% using multiple public clouds mostly on US-made technology, according to research by analyst firm Forrester. 

"After a slow start, Europeans now recognize cloud for its support for new apps and also as affordable compute and storage for existing ones," it said.

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While European businesses have undergone a major shift to cloud in pursuit of speed, scalability and innovation, the top concerns over using public cloud were security and privacy around data protection and disaster recovery (32%), and application security and protection (31%). Lesser concerns were lack of internal governance over public cloud storage (26%), lack of performance (23%), and compliance (21%). 

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Forrester, in its State of Cloud in Europe 2022 report, said on average, infrastructure decision makers at European enterprises claim 41% of their total application portfolio is already in the public cloud, while 58% anticipate that their firm will migrate over the next two years.  

Over half (56%) of people who buy IT infrastructure cite modernization as their top priority, according to Forrester.   

But in the absence of any European hyperscale cloud provider, Forrester notes that regulation is a big issue for European cloud markets. 

The French-German initiative GAIA-X hasn't made a huge impact since its launch in 2020. It's hoped it can serve as a vehicle to reduce Europe's dependence on non-EU technology. GAIA-X is headed up by Germany's T-Systems and France's OVHcloud.

In November, French GAIA-X founding member Scalaway quit the initiative due to it "accepting all the non-European dominating cloud service providers without any limitation."Amazon Web Services and Microsoft joined GAIA-X in 2020.    

Scaleway chief Yann Lechelle cited research from Synergy Research Group that showed European cloud providers' share of the European market fell from 27% to below 16% between 2017 and 2021.

That decline in share came as the European market for public cloud grew fourfold. It was worth