By design, central banks are cautious. Protecting a nation’s currency and financial stability are serious matters, ill-suited to risk-taking and chancy deals. In a world of Tiger Onitsuka trainers and tech-bro t-shirts, central bankers wear a suit and tie.
It may seem superficially surprising, then, when one of Europe’s central banks announces that it is moving its essential cloud services away from the tried and trusted U.S. giants of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to a company more famous for selling groceries at bargain prices.
Two weeks ago, the Dutch central bank said its cloud services would now be supported by Schwartz Digits, part of the Lidl low-cost supermarket group (latest offer, a five-pack of oranges for $1.34). Schwartz Digits was originally built to support the retail business, bringing value-butter and eggs to grateful consumers. It is now a successful provider of secure data services to European businesses and government organizations. De Nederlandsche Bank is just the latest win.
A trend is developing in Europe that should give the American corporate world, and particularly the White House, pause for thought. The U.S. tech giants, whose services are lauded for their performance, are being increasingly eschewed in favor of European alternatives. The Dutch government has also announced its first deals with StackIT, a subsidiary of Schwartz Digits.
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The country’s justice and security minister, David van Weel, said the agreement was “an important step in reducing our dependence on parties outside Europe and strengthening our digital resilience,” Dutch News reported. Other customers of StackIT include Commerzbank and the Hamburg Port Authority. SAP has also announced moves to strengthen its European-based digital infrastructure.
This is not an issue of skills or scale–Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have plenty of both. Rather, geopolitical risk is prompting action as American and European approaches to digital security diverge. Protections against Chinese providers have long been “top of mind”. The same is now true of the U.S. as Europe seeks to become more “digitally sovereign” in how it approaches data security and resilience.
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