However, unless issues such as data sovereignty and the competition brought by US hyperscalers are tackled, half the potential growth could go unrealised.
The warning was issued by KPMG France and cloud operators OVHcloud, InfraNum, Talan and Linkt, who have collaborated to launch a white paper on the cloud-related issues facing Europe in the short-term.
Their research found that 82% of the decision-makers increased their use of the cloud in direct response to the pandemic last year. Comprising Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the European market grew by 27% per year between 2017 and 2019.
The findings said the market "was worth an estimated €53 billion in 2020 and is expected to climb to between €300 billion and €500 billion by 2027-2030".
"The Covid-19 pandemic further accelerated the use of cloud services, which proved their strategic importance as vital infrastructure that breeds resilience. 82% of the decision-makers surveyed said they had increased their use of the cloud in direct response to the pandemic," it continued.
European cloud specialists and telecom operators are gradually increasing their foothold in their domestic markets. For example OVHcloud and Deutsche Telekom are ranked third and fourth in their respective countries in the markets for IaaS and PaaS.
Yet the report specifically highlighted the concentration of power in the market. In fact three major hyperscalers control 70% of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market across the continent: Amazon with AWS (53%), Microsoft with Azure (9%) and Google Cloud (8%).
News of the report broke as Orange and Capgemini announced they are working with Microsoft to launch Bleu, a sovereign cloud solution in France intended to tackle these very issues.
