Public Cloud Platforms In Europe

The newest edition of this evaluation, published in August 2024, is built around a distinction European buyers have been demanding for years: a region-separated cloud is not automatically a sovereign one. The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms In Europe, Q3 2024, scores platforms offered from Europe for European users, and its Leader won on the strictest reading of that distinction.

The report under the name: The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms In Europe, Q3 2024

The Q3 2024 Wave was authored by principal analyst Dario Maisto and evaluates providers against a thirty two-criterion catalog. It is the Europe leg of the three-edition public cloud cycle Forrester ran in 2024, alongside the global and China editions, and its theme is deliberately different from both.

The context the report names is the market's own direction: sovereignty concerns are carving the public cloud market into regional and national components amid trade tensions, and digital sovereignty now extends beyond cloud infrastructure to hardware, software, network, and data, including in-region data centers and supply chain controls.

The precision point is the one to carry into any European procurement: a provider operating in Europe with physical, legal, and logical separation is not automatically a sovereign cloud vendor. Sovereignty requires adherence to the regulatory and certification regimes, and the scorecard grades the vendors on exactly that distance.

The scope itself is worth noting. This edition scores platforms offered from Europe for European users, which excludes the hyperscalers' global platforms and puts the regional and national providers on a scorecard of their own, the only one of the three public cloud editions where the field is not the usual giants. That scope decision is the report's quiet argument: the European sovereignty question cannot be answered by scoring the global platforms on global criteria, so the European providers get their own test.

The Leader and its sovereignty-by-design claim

T-Systems, with its T Cloud Public platform, formerly Open Telekom Cloud, took a Leader placement, and Forrester's citation is unusually strong for a European edition: its "vision and product roadmap are superior to the competition."

The scored strengths read like a sovereign-cloud checklist turned into a product: advanced IaaS and PaaS automation, a GPU portfolio, big data and AI tools, an API gateway, data processing governance, OCR, and the report's standout detail, it was the only vendor offering an internal-knowledge chatbot.

The sovereignty architecture underneath is the "Sovereignty by Design" claim: exclusive European operation, an OpenStack foundation, transparent security and encryption, exclusion of access from outside Europe, and reduced provider dependencies. Forrester's fit verdict names the buyer: organizations in insurance, finance, automotive, and pharmaceuticals, the four industries where the sovereignty question is a compliance question first.

What the edition means by sovereignty

The report's sovereignty treatment is the reason this edition exists, and its strictness is the point. It is not enough to host data in Frankfurt. It is not enough to be a European company. The scorecard distinguishes between providers that are European, providers that are separated, and providers that are sovereign under the certification regimes, and the difference between the three is where the European market's real purchasing decisions happen.

The sustainability thread runs alongside. European users' priorities on sovereignty and sustainability jointly shape procurement, and the providers winning this scorecard are the ones that treat both as product architecture, energy sourcing and carbon reporting built in, rather than as marketing appendices.

The sustainability criteria are the edition's forward-looking half. Where sovereignty is the defensive question, who can lawfully touch the data, sustainability is the operational one, how much energy does the data cost, and the two increasingly appear in the same procurement conversation because European buyers treat them as one posture. A provider that wins on sovereignty but loses on energy disclosure wins half the argument, and the scorecard grades both halves.

The honest limits of a sovereignty scorecard

One Leader placement and the edition's framing are publicly confirmed; the rest of the field's placements have not surfaced in the open record, and this article names nothing the record does not support.

There is also the structural question no scorecard can settle: sovereignty certifications are issued by national and European bodies whose requirements move, and a sovereignty claim certified today can be re-examined tomorrow. The tier column measures the vendor's sovereignty posture at evaluation time. The procurement must measure it against the regulation in force at contract time, and the two can disagree.

The triad comparison completes the picture. This edition sits beside the global Q4 2024 Wave, where the hyperscalers lead, and the China Q3 2024 Wave, where the domestic giants lead, and the three scorecards disagree about the same vendors by design. The Europe edition's real message is that a European buyer running the global tier column as their shortlist is shortlisting vendors whose sovereignty posture this edition exists to question, and the two scorecards must be read together, not either one alone.

Three questions for the sovereign buyer

Which level of sovereignty does your regulator actually require: European, separated, or certified? The report's own three-way distinction is the question. Match the requirement to the vendor's level, because overpaying for certification you do not need is as real a risk as underbuying it.

Where do the data pathways actually run? The Leader's claim is exclusive European operation and no outside access. Ask every vendor for the full data pathway map, processing locations, analyst locations, and cross-border procedures, in writing, because the scorecard cannot audit your specific workloads. A map you cannot verify is a claim you are financing.

What does the AI stack touch, and from where? Sovereignty now extends to the models. Ask where inference runs, which models process your data, and what leaves the region when an AI feature is used, and treat a vendor that cannot answer as unsovereign by default.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

This pairs closely with Public Cloud Platforms In China, where forrester now scores China's public cloud market on its own separate rulebook, because the country's data residency rules and domestic AI model supply chain make it a parallel market rather than a regional slice of the global one.