Private cloud is losing importance: the proportion of pure private cloud strategies is falling from 22 per cent (2024) to 14 per cent (2025) Multi-cloud is gaining momentum: 14 per cent of companies already use it, 22 per cent are planning to start using it Sovereignty and resilience are coming into focus: Five years ago, only 25 per cent considered these factors to be crucial, but today 47 per cent already see their future strategic relevance
The German cloud landscape is undergoing a paradigm shift towards strategic sovereignty. German companies are abandoning their public cloud-only strategy, switching to multi-cloud and increasingly relying on European cloud providers as transformation partners. This is the finding of the recently published study ‘EuroCloud Pulse Check 2025’ by techconsult GmbH on behalf of the EuroCloud Germany Initiative of the eco association, supported by plusserver and others. Decision-makers are rethinking their approach and putting sovereignty and resilience back at the centre. Today, almost twice as many executives (47 per cent) consider both factors to be crucial for future business success than five years ago (25 per cent).
German cloud landscape becoming more heterogeneous
The development of cloud strategies clearly shows that the deployment landscape in Germany is becoming increasingly diverse. In 2024, 22 per cent of the companies surveyed will still rely exclusively on private clouds; today, the figure is only 14 per cent.
Hybrid clouds dominate with a usage share of 57 per cent, making them the most important deployment method. More than half of the companies (54 per cent) want to continue with this approach in the future. At the same time, multi-cloud is gaining momentum: 22 per cent of companies are planning this strategy for the future (up from 14 per cent previously). International crises and political uncertainties are having a significant impact on this change. The foreign policy of the United States is unsettling 57 per cent of respondents, which is why sovereignty and resilience are becoming priorities. Meanwhile, 83 per cent of respondents rate these factors as extremely relevant.
Companies are setting priorities to become more sovereign.
The majority of German companies are already in the process of strategically implementing sovereignty. Regular security checks are standard for 42 per cent – a significant increase from 30 per cent in the previous year. Data encryption is used by 38 per cent of companies, while data quality assurance is becoming increasingly relevant at 35 per cent (up from 24 per cent last year). The study also paints a clear picture when it comes to resilience: for 37 per cent of respondents, cybersecurity is the most important factor, closely followed by a flexible IT infrastructure at 35 per cent. Already, 67 per cent of companies are able to quickly scale and adapt their systems. IT reliability ranks third at 34 per cent, followed by innovation (32 per cent) and stable supply chains (31 per cent). These five pillars illustrate that companies understand resilience as an interplay of technology, organisation and processes.
New partners for business-critical workloads
European superscalers such as plusserver are positioning themselves as a regional response to US hyperscalers by combining scalability with a clear focus on data protection and sovereignty. Hyperscalers, on the other hand, score points with massive scalability, global availability and portfolio breadth. Superscalers are primarily used for business-critical workloads. Backup & disaster recovery tops the list of preferences with 66 per cent of mentions. This is followed by Kubernetes/container solutions and compliance and data residency solutions, each with 64 per cent. This preference continues for other critical infrastructure and security services: security-as-a-service, virtual machines, data analysis and data warehousing each achieve 63 per cent. Storage solutions and identity and access management are also highly rated, with 62 per cent of mentions each. The high preference ratings show that European superscalers are increasingly being used pragmatically by decision-makers, primarily to securely relocate critical workloads and migratable applications such as containers and Kubernetes. In doing so, IT decision-makers are laying the foundation for US-independent IT. Superscalers are driving the new sovereignty The results of the ‘EuroCloud Pulse Check 2025’ show a fundamental change in the German cloud landscape. Pure public or private cloud models are increasingly taking a back seat, while hybrid and multi-cloud approaches dominate. The goal behind this is diversification: reducing dependencies, spreading risks and building resilience. However, both diversification and resilience require a common foundation: sovereignty. European superscalers combine scalability with data sovereignty and legal proximity, making them strategic partners for an independent and resilient cloud world in uncertain times.
About the study:
The study ‘EuroCloud Pulse Check 2025: Digital Resilience Made in Europe: Strategies for a Sovereign Cloud Future’ was conducted by techconsult GmbH and commissioned by EuroCloud Deutschland_eco e. V. It is based on 258 online interviews with IT and business managers at German companies with 50 or more employees. The representative sample comes primarily from the service sector (41%) and industry (31%), while retail, banking & insurance and public administration each account for 9%.
