Comment by AdriaanvRossum
3 years ago
It is. Most startups in the EU have to use more and more businesses in the EU. The selection is little, so way more changes to succeed if your EU based and serve both markets.
I run Simple Analytics [1], which is a privacy-first analytics business from the Netherlands. I see a lot of business from the EU just because we are from the EU as well.
Frankly, as a EU company (based in Germany no less) I'm steering clear of any US SaaS whenever possible. Even if they operate in the EU they're usually a legal headache because privacy compliance is added as an afterthought and they'll often carelessly transfer data to US servers based on assumptions that should have been abandoned when Privacy Shield was torn down in the courts.
Out of the big cloud providers only Azure feels even remotely safe to use (if only because of the privacy reputation of Google and Amazon).
Wait, why would Microsoft have a better reputation ?
Because (NSA aside), they have been caught less often transferring private information and "stolen" company secrets to third parties ?
Because their compliance is not an afterthought like the poster above said. You can't even assign an Office 365 licence to someone until you say what country they are in, so their data is kept in the right jurisdiction. I know someone will reply...blah blah no true scotsman...but compare that to most saas that doesnt even give the option
Google is an advertising company that is literally built on non-consensual data harvesting. AWS is an outgrowth of Amazon, which is likewise massively invested in data mining (though mostly on Amazon itself).
Microsoft's telemetry in end user products is known to tech savvy people but the company is mostly known for its operating system and office suite that most businesses already use. Additionally in Germany Microsoft used to offload its enterprise services to Deutsche Telekom (or T-Online I think) operating them for MS under the Microsoft brand, thus appearing even more trustworthy by effectively handing over control to a well-known German company. This changed but reputation sticks.
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