![\"\"](\".\/media_1acbaa5998e111353962967f5d5308b6fc9a8d7bc.jpg?width=750&format=jpg&optimize=medium\")
<\/p>\nDespite demand for sovereign cloud, the government is struggling to break its addiction to US tech<\/p>\n
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The UK government talks a big game, but its particular demands make it difficult to give local tech more than crumbs.<\/strong><\/p>\n Back in the early 19th century, London\u2019s Tobacco Dock was a warehouse to receive and store tobacco imported from the New World.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n Watch out for coverage of my raising these questions with Google coming soon, but the aspect I\u2019ll dig into here is digital sovereignty: an increasingly important issue for the public sector.<\/p>\n This week one Danish government department announced<\/a> it would ditch Microsoft in favour of LibreOffice; and last month, European leaders shared plans<\/a> to boost competitiveness with US providers. So, Kyle\u2019s comments about favouring local tech follow the form to an extent.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s the alternative?<\/p>\n 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\u2019s not going to fall over at scale. Reliability is critical, and that limits your options.<\/p>\n Even if you\u2019re committed to using local providers, most will spin up their systems on AWS, Azure or GCP.<\/p>\n If the government is really serious about boosting the UK\u2019s tech sector \u2013 now worth \u00a31 trillion<\/a> \u2013 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\u2019s now-repealed Section 174<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve seen little similar movement at home. Instead, the government is struggling to wean itself off of US tech.<\/p>\n Recommended Reads:<\/p>\n Agentic AI was almost absent from Google Cloud London, but not because the tech is dead: it\u2019s becoming ubiquitous, moving from proof to production even in government. Defra CTO Paul Mukherjee<\/a> says the tech is going to be critical in complex tasks like cloud migrations.<\/p>\n AI seems to be everywhere, and even non-profits are getting in on the action. Citizens Advice, the charity helping people manage critical financial issues, decided to implement a chatbot \u2013 and then make sure the public couldn\u2019t use it. Click here<\/a> to find out why.<\/p>\n Finally, we often hear that software vendors should take more responsibility for fixing flaws. That\u2019s a philosophy Dustin Kirkland of Chainguard agrees with, and the company follows it with a rolling enterprise Linux distribution based on the open source Wolfi OS. John Leonard found out<\/a> how Chainguard is addressing vulnerabilities before they reach the user.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite demand for sovereign cloud, the government is struggling to break its addiction to US tech The UK…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3164],"tags":[14270,3284,9407,867,3285,1234,1197,60394,1200,53,16,10788,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-263896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-cloud-computing","9":"tag-computing","10":"tag-editorial","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-google-cloud","13":"tag-government","14":"tag-investment","15":"tag-peter-kyle","16":"tag-tax","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-uk-government","20":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114850958280465833","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}