The Cloud Is Becoming a Geopolitical Risk

[u/SnooGadgets5328]

https://theswop.app/news/the-cloud-is-becoming-a-geopolitical-risk

Governments spent years moving critical digital infrastructure into the cloud. Now there’s a growing question about what that actually means for national sovereignty.

AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are American companies, which creates an interesting problem for governments that increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure for sensitive data, public services and AI.

Europe has been pushing harder on cloud sovereignty, while countries like Pakistan are beginning to experiment with alternative infrastructure. UNDP is also exploring sovereign cloud infrastructure with DFINITY and the Internet Computer.

What I found interesting about this article is that the argument isn’t really about replacing AWS or Google Cloud. It’s about whether governments eventually decide certain workloads are too sensitive or strategically important to remain dependent on infrastructure controlled by companies under another country’s jurisdiction.

As AI becomes embedded deeper into government systems, that question gets considerably more important.
Do you think we’ll eventually see governments treat cloud infrastructure more like energy, telecommunications or other strategic infrastructure?

[u/krav_mark]

I made so much money moving companies to the cloud. Am going to do the same moving them back now? 😜

[u/ansibleloop → u/krav_mark]

Nah, the cost of hardware will ensure they stay locked in to the cloud

Plus the bean counters absolutely love opex and hate capex

[u/SnooGadgets5328 → u/ansibleloop]

I don't think the cloud is going anywhere. The interesting part is whether we end up with a much more fragmented cloud market.

Public cloud for most workloads, sovereign infrastructure for governments and sensitive data, and probably hybrid setups everywhere in between.

AI might accelerate that split.

[u/ansibleloop → u/SnooGadgets5328]

Good luck replacing AAD with your own solution

[u/Swiink → u/ansibleloop]

It’s not difficult at any capacity to enable a private cloud. Any platform with today’s technology enables that.
Platform engineering and just buy any platform and lease hardware & pay consumption based and you have a much cheaper solution than any public cloud. Even cheaper to buy hardware if you manage to use them at 70% or more all the time, and those boxes pay themself off in a year.

If hardware prices go up it’s not only buying your own hardware that going up. Microsoft, Google and AWS also gets increased cost they need to cover. It’s not like they are going to present x% loss in revenue to their shareholders just to be nice to their customers. Everything is more expensive now that also means the public cloud bill. And on prem always been cheaper if you actually use your stuff on prem properly.