Despite demand for sovereign cloud, the government is struggling to break its addiction to US tech

The UK government talks a big game, but its particular demands make it difficult to give local tech more than crumbs.

Back in the early 19th century, London’s Tobacco Dock was a warehouse to receive and store tobacco imported from the New World.

The tobacco is now a distant memory, but the building is still hosting products from the Americas for British consumption. These days, they mostly come from California.

Google’s Cloud London event focuses on its product and partner announcements for the UK, and this year the big news came from UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, who talked about a new private-public partnership between government and Google, but at the same time promised to make it easier for UK tech firms to get a slice of the public spending pie.

I raised several questions when I published our article about the announcement yesterday. How will UK data be protected from the grasp of the US CLOUD Act? Is it safe to put a US hyperscaler at the heart of digital government? What about vendor lock-in?

Watch out for coverage of my raising these questions with Google coming soon, but the aspect I’ll dig into here is digital sovereignty: an increasingly important issue for the public sector.

This week one Danish government department announced it would ditch Microsoft in favour of LibreOffice; and last month, European leaders shared plans to boost competitiveness with US providers. So, Kyle’s comments about favouring local tech follow the form to an extent.

At the heart of these policy shifts is growing unease over how much of Europe’s digital infrastructure is under the sway of US hyperscalers. But what’s the alternative?

The private sector can get away with taking a risk and working with a smaller firm for an ERP, CRM or what have you. In government (or healthcare, law enforcement, military, etc), you need to know it’s not going to fall over at scale. Reliability is critical, and that limits your options.

Even if you’re committed to using local providers, most will spin up their systems on AWS, Azure or GCP.

If the government is really serious about boosting the UK’s tech sector – now worth £1 trillion – it needs to do more than provide procurement opportunities. The sector needs support that will let us build infrastructure to compete with hyperscalers, on the scale of the USA’s now-repealed Section 174.

The European Union is moving slowly but surely in the direction of sovereign cloud. For all of the high-flying ideals and plans, though, we’ve seen little similar movement at home. Instead, the government is struggling to wean itself off of US tech.

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