You might have heard lately of Microsoft inking deals with local Cloud providers, so that customers may use Microsoft Cloud services hosted in local datacenters? Whatever one may think about this being “true Cloud” or not, this is of no surprise to us.
In our latest study about Cloud in France, the PAC CloudIndex, we asked the participants what would be their key criteria to select a Public Cloud provider. The number 1 criterion was: “a datacenter located in France” (39% of respondents)… with the number 2 criterion being: “a company headquartered in France” (27% of respondents). Furthermore; 25% of respondents declared they would prefer a software vendor hosting its SaaS offering on a French sovereign Cloud.
It clearly shows how much the PRISM scandal has hit the market. Although it was not that different from the Patriot Act, which everybody already got to know a decade ago, the NSA surveillance has been heavily broadcasted and thus raised a deep mistrust amongst customers.
Companies were already aware of possible surveillance by US authorities, and acted accordingly by setting up Private Clouds with local providers, or by choosing Cloud services hosted by local providers (for instance, Office 365 was available as a service hosted by local partners long before the PRISM scandal and current announcements in the press).
Now fear, uncertainty and doubt (the famous FUD) rule the client’s opinions. In some cases, using SaaS, PaaS and IaaS as before won’t be a problem. But the large majority of companies and governments have to reassure their customers, partners, citizens and shareholders that they do their best to protect sensitive, personal data and competitive assets.
In this perspective, Microsoft’s announcement is clearly a good move to restore confidence, and it leaves a great role to play to system integrators. Companies will move to hybrid Clouds and mix and match multiple resources (various SaaS applications, some hosted abroad, some hosted locally, in-house services, public IaaS for workload overflow, etc.). They will need consulting and design services, as well as strong tools and skills for management and orchestration.
All PAC CloudIndex results for France are freely available on our dedicated website www.cloudindex.fr
