Cloud switch on global CIOs' agenda as risks rise

Half of all non-US chief information officers (CIOs) expect to change cloud vendors due to regional factors, according to a survey by tech research and advisory company Gartner.

Gartner released its report on the survey, which included responses from 2,500 CIOs, on Tuesday, a day after the outage of Amazon Web Services.

The report was based on data gathered in the May-June period from CIOs from all geographies, revenue bands, as well as public and private industry sectors, according to Gartner.


The survey found 32% of CIOs increasing focus on finding vendors from their own region. More than 75% of European and Middle Eastern enterprises will 'geopatriate' their virtual workloads to reduce geopolitical risk by 2030, up from less than 5% in 2025, Gartner said in its report.

Geopatriation, or the moving of company data and applications from global public clouds managed by hyperscalers to sovereign clouds, regional cloud providers or owned data centres, has been identified by Gartner as a top strategic technology trend for 2026.

The findings point to an expected increase in the number of companies implementing technical and contractual measures with public cloud hyperscalers to reduce exposure to the geopolitical risks associated with large cloud providers.

In May, Gartner advised its clients to geopatriate applications to on-premises data centres or colocation as an option for a select few vital business applications, but warned of potential loss in business agility, technical features and the risk of diminished resiliency.

According to Gartner's own data from March, the cloud market is predominantly controlled by eight key vendors, which collectively represent 97% of the total market share. Among these, AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle--all based in the US--account for 84% of the market. China-based companies Alibaba Cloud, Huawei and Tencent contribute 13% to the market. The remaining 3% consists of smaller players, resulting in a highly concentrated competitive landscape.

Overreliance of Indian companies on a few, foreign cloud service providers is one of the key concerns among policymakers considering one-off risk events or geopolitical pressures on foreign domiciled companies.

The latest of this occurred on Monday, when a technical error stopped more than 100 AWS services, bringing down thousands of websites and apps. The outage lasted for nearly 15 hours and affected AWS operating region US-EAST-1, and global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints.

Earlier this year, Microsoft had suspended services for Russian oil and gas major Rosneft-backed Nayara Energy, responding to European sanctions.

The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) has increasingly pushed for developing sovereign cloud options in India. Case in point, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) last month signed a pact with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to drive and scale the development of India's sovereign cloud ecosystem. Private players such as SAP have also announced sovereign cloud services to ensure data localisation.