It’s not possible to operate a completely sovereign cloud outside of China or the USA, according to Douglas Toombs, a VP analyst at Gartner.

Speaking at the analyst firm’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney, Toombs said only the US and China make all the tech needed for a sovereign cloud. Buyers elsewhere can’t avoid relationships with foreign providers.

Toombs said that while US-based cloud vendors have created products they say can meet the needs of organisations that need a cloud that doesn’t have legal entanglements outside their chosen jurisdiction, the fact they’re ultimately owned by American corporations means it’s not possible to be certain a cloud provider can promise complete sovereignty.

Even on-prem clouds like AWS Outposts, Azure Local, or Oracle’s Dedicated Cloud Regions, “need to phone home,” he said.

The analyst doesn’t think attempts to create sovereign clouds will succeed. He mentioned past French attempts to create sovereign clouds named “Andromeda”, “Numergy,” and “Gaia-X”, which he says went nowhere – but did produce some nice white papers.

He also cited the The Rule of Three and Four, a maxim developed by Boston Consulting Group that asserts “A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest,” and argued that it predicts the cloud market has settled around AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

Toombs allowed that some smaller clouds could thrive and will make it feasible to create sovereign SaaS providers and products.

But he thinks that even aggressive moves to go on-prem won’t free organisations from dependency on US-owned clouds, an assertion he backed with the example of a Dutch healthcare provider that tried to build its own infrastructure but then experienced an outage when a supplier’s services went down along with a major cloud provider.

If sovereign clouds fail to develop, it may be problematic because some European organisations are worried US-based cloud operators might leave the continent, forcing them into hasty and risky migration projects, according to Adrian Wong, a Gartner Director Analyst who also spoke in Sydney.

Wong said “heightened geopolitical tensions” are causing customers of major clouds to rethink their strategies, a decision he welcomes because he sees very few organisations bother to develop a cloud exit strategy.

“Exit plans are overlooked,” he said, and users are “very much locked in” – especially when they use cloud-native services or platform-as-a-service.

“Exiting within a timeframe of anything less than two years takes significant planning and investment,” he warned. “Exit strategies and plans are largely swept under the rug.”

Wong says he is now seeing “the pendulum swing.”

Not developing a cloud exit strategy is one of the ten big mistakes Wong sees users make. Also on his list are starting use of clouds with mission-critical and complex applications like ERP, assuming the cloud is appropriate for all applications, and expecting to get all the benefits of the cloud with every application.

He also said it’s folly to assume that going multi-cloud will improve availability – unless users first tackle the more complex and expensive task of making applications portable. Wong said organisations that use multiple clouds should do so to access specific features of each, not to improve resilience.