oFF-PREM
Nearly three-quarters worry Washington could cut access, yet fewer than half regularly test their fallback
Nearly three-quarters of businesses surveyed in the UK, France, and Germany fear Washington could abruptly cut their access to the US tech platforms on which they depend.The finding comes from a survey of 1,500 businesses in the three countries conducted by Proton, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, which was founded by scientists who met at CERN.Businesses have long relied on companies such as Microsoft and Google for email and productivity software. Moving those tools into the cloud has also given providers a central switch with which to withdraw access.
Geopolitical tensions between European countries and the Trump administration have brought concerns about such a possibility to the fore, especially after the US government issued an export control directive preventing any non-US citizen from accessing some Anthropic AI models.
A previous study by Proton claimed that over 74 percent of all publicly listed European companies depend on US-based tech services, and a report last year from Synergy Research found that the European cloud infrastructure market is sewn up by the big American operators, with local firms making up just 15 percent of it.Proton says nearly three in four respondents (73.9 percent) were concerned that the US government could cut off their access to American technology providers. Just one in 20 expressed no concern at all.More than half (54.5 percent) of respondents said they could continue operating for no more than a single business day before shutting down if they lost access to cloud and digital services entirely.Among large businesses, 28.7 percent estimated that a day offline would cost more than €100,000 ($115,000), while 45 percent put the damage above €50,000 ($57,000).These concerns have been widely discussed, such as at the Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels earlier this year, where (surprise, surprise) open source was held up as the solution to the problem.
