About this Report

Cloud and data sovereignty have rarely been more politically charged, at least in the English-speaking world. The debate is largely a transatlantic one: European institutions pushing companies to reduce reliance on American providers, American commentators framing EU data regulation as a competitive burden. The US Cloud Act (which allows American authorities to compel access to data stored anywhere in the world by US-based companies) has become an existential concern for many European organisations. The response from commentators and vendors alike has been a steady drumbeat: repatriate your data, move workloads back on-premise, reduce your exposure to American hyperscalers.

We surveyed more than 3,000 cloud developers about what they have actually done to their cloud and infrastructure setup in the last 12 months and what they are planning to do in the next 24. The picture that emerges is both more complicated and more interesting than the repatriation narrative suggests. The story is not that sovereignty concerns are not a part of developers’ considerations but that these concerns are concentrated in ways the broad narrative consistently misses. For most developers, the forces shaping cloud decisions have far more to do with costs, performance, and control than with geopolitics.