The numbers are in: How concerned are UK organizations about geopolitical cloud risk?

In 2025, our research found that 61% of UK IT leaders found data sovereignty to be a strategic priority for their organization. 12 months later, this number is now at 73%. 

The numbers we have seen in this year's research show that cloud dependency and geopolitical risk are no longer abstract concerns. They've become concrete, measurable operational challenges that are reshaping how UK organizations think about their digital future.

Geopolitical risk has moved from concern to boardroom priority

The 12-point rise in organizations recognizing data sovereignty as a strategic priority is significant, but it only tells part of the story. What's more revealing is why this shift is happening.

77% of UK IT leaders remain deeply concerned about the exposure of their data infrastructure to geopolitical risk. This isn't theoretical anxiety. It's rooted in real operational experience.

The drivers behind this concern are immediate and measurable:

• 61% of organizations cite escalating regulatory and compliance pressures as their primary operational driver
• 39% experienced outages originating in US hyperscalers in the last year
• 15% experienced these outages multiple times

This is no longer a conversation happening in infrastructure teams. When boardrooms are discussing the £1 million impact of a foreign provider's outage, sovereignty moves from a compliance checkbox to a business continuity imperative. The rise from 61% to 73% reflects this shift: organizations are elevating sovereignty from a technical consideration to a strategic priority because the operational and financial consequences of not doing so have become impossible to ignore. 

The intention-execution gap: The vendor lock-in trap

Here's where the data becomes genuinely concerning: organizations recognize the need for change, but structural constraints are preventing them from acting on it.

66% of leaders would consider switching cloud providers to regain control. That's a clear statement of intent. Yet only 15% have successfully migrated usage to domestic alternatives. The 51-point gap between stated intention and actual execution reveals that vendor lock-in is real, and it's preventing organizations from acting on their strategic priorities.

This manifests in even starker terms when you ask leaders directly: only one in four truly believes they could exit a major US provider. For a significant minority, the answer is blunt: they can't leave at all.

What creates this lock-in? It's a combination of factors that accumulate gradually:

This research is demonstrating that organizations are not intentionally locking themselves in. Instead, lock-in happens incrementally through accumulated dependencies that gradually become structural constraints. By the time an organization recognizes the problem, the friction cost of escaping it has become prohibitively high.  

Market concentration and the call for credible alternatives

Understanding why vendor lock-in is so difficult to escape requires looking at the broader market structure. US platforms currently capture 80% of the cloud market. This concentration is both a cause and a consequence of lock-in.

When hyperscale providers dominate the market, they set the terms of engagement. Alternatives exist, but they operate at fundamentally different scales and costs. For most organizations, the calculus is straightforward: switching to a smaller provider means accepting higher costs, different operational models, and risk that the alternative provider might not scale with their needs.

Yet organizational appetite for alternatives is growing, not out of preference for change, but out of necessity. 28% of organizations now expect to deepen their reliance on US hyperscalers, up from 12% last year. This doubling is counterintuitive until you recognize that many organizations may be deepening reliance not by choice, but because they're unable to execute viable exit strategies.

Despite this constraint, 90% of IT leaders are calling for a more proactive government stance to actively back British cloud technology.

This isn't protectionism. It's a recognition that credible alternatives exist but need support to become genuinely competitive:

• 72% of leaders agree that UK innovation requires domestic infrastructure
• 43% cite high compute costs as the primary barrier to entry for domestic alternatives
• Organizations want to diversify but need cost-competitive options to make that transition realistic

UK organizations are ready to move away from concentrated dependency on foreign providers, but they need viable, scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. Without them, market concentration will persist, lock-in will deepen, and organizations will remain trapped in infrastructure decisions driven by inertia rather than strategy.

What the numbers mean

The digital landscape is shifting. Regulatory pressures are intensifying. Geopolitical risks are materializing. Organizations can see the problem clearly. But seeing the problem and solving it are two different things.

Our full whitepaper explores these findings in depth, presenting the complete research data, case studies of organizations navigating these challenges, and practical frameworks for building sovereignty into infrastructure decisions.

The moment for action is now, but execution requires understanding not just that change is necessary, but how to navigate the practical and structural constraints that make change difficult.