Industry Findings: Across Europe, digital sovereignty and regulatory tightening are reshaping how organisations approach recoverability, as cross-border data flows now carry compliance and operational-exposure implications. The European Union’s NIS2 directive, effective Jan-2023, reinforced obligations for improved continuity practices and mandated more rigorous oversight of recovery preparedness across essential and important entities. This regulation is driving enterprises to strengthen retention governance, reassess failover geography choices and conduct structured restore-validation exercises that can withstand supervisory audits. The regional shift pushes firms toward architectures that provide verifiable recovery chains, harmonised policy controls and jurisdictionally aligned storage practices, creating a clearer link between regulatory compliance and operational resilience outcomes.
Industry Player Insights: Europe's competitive environment is driven by OVHcloud, Aruba S.p.A., IONOS Group, and Outscale etc. Providers are differentiating through sovereign-hosting depth and recovery automation sophistication. OVHcloud signalled this competitive arc in Feb-2024 when it expanded its European SecNumCloud-certified offerings, enabling stricter isolation for backup retention and clearer auditability for regulated workloads. Aruba S.p.A. strengthened the regional landscape in Jun-2024 by enhancing its hyperscale datacentre capacity in Italy, creating additional low-latency zones for DR staging and long-term archival storage. These developments steer enterprises toward partners that offer sovereignty-backed continuity capabilities, consistent immutability controls and repeatable recovery execution inside EU regulatory boundaries.