This chapter is a departure from other chapters in this book. It’s a look at my personal experiences traveling the globe and observing how differences in cultures impact how different areas accept and adopt the cloud and cloud capabilities.
In my current job, I’ve had the privilege to tour the world talking to companies about the cloud. In these travels, I’ve noticed that how the cloud is utilized and how it impacts company culture varies based on what part of the world you are in. Much of this is due to country and region cultural differences working their way into corporate culture. If you are working in a multinational corporation and working on cloud adoption, you may find these differences intriguing.
I’ve specifically noticed trends that vary between Europe, the United States, southeastern Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. Based on my travels, I’ve identified five specific areas where geographic diversity impacts cloud adoption.
Cloud Matters Everywhere, But at Different Levels
Interest in various ways organizations can leverage the cloud is a universal truth across industries and the world. However, the level and maturity of cloud adoption varies by geography. I talked about cloud maturity in “Six Levels of Cloud Maturity”, but that focused on corporate culture. What I identified in my travels is that there is a geographic divergence in how the cloud is adopted.
For example, companies based in Australia and New Zealand tend to be faster adopters of cloud technologies than their counterparts in other parts of the world. They hunger for information about what they can do to leverage the cloud to make their businesses better. They proactively look at early technology and want to learn how it might impact and help grow their business.
Conversely, in Germany and other areas of the DACH region,1 it is the exact opposite. Companies in this region are more safety conscious and want to fully understand the impact of a technology before moving forward with it. When confronted with a piece of technology, their response is frequently, “How is this better than what I already have, and what problems might it cause?” This is a more conservative approach to technology.
Neither way is right or wrong, but they are distinct and unique ways to look at cloud adoption.
Replacement Mentality Impacts How You Adopt Cloud
I noticed a significant difference in how different parts of the world approach fixing and resolving problems across their technology architecture.
To understand this, we need to look at some history, starting back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Historically in Europe and North America, most products that were needed by an industrialized nation were produced locally or at least were readily available along very strong trade routes. As such, it was easy to get equipment, and when equipment broke down, it was easy to get spare parts for that equipment. This created a “replacement mentality” where broken items were easily repaired and replaced and never thought of again. Things broke, but the problems that arose were easily overcome, and the solutions to problems were permanent solutions.
In more remote areas, such as New Zealand, this was not the case. New Zealand is very isolated and had extremely long and thin trade routes. It would historically take six months for products to ship to New Zealand, so replacement parts were hard to come by. If a tractor on a farm broke down, waiting six months for a replacement part meant you lost the entire planting season. As such, companies and individuals had to become quite ingenious in figuring out how to fix broken equipment on their own with only the things they had on hand. Quick and temporary fixes were common, and equipment was held together just well enough to complete the job.
In New Zealand, they even have an expression representing this tendency. That expression is “number 8 wire mentality.” It comes from the size of wire that was commonly available in remote areas of New Zealand and commonly used to rig temporary fixes to machinery. The phrase “number 8 wire mentality” is still used today to describe the Kiwi strategy of using whatever scrap materials are on hand to solve a problem.
This difference in approach between well-connected countries and less-connected countries even impacts the current mindsets of companies in these countries today. In Europe, there is a tendency to fix things using solid, well-defined processes and procedures using well-tested and “approved” methods. This includes software and how they leverage the cloud. In the United States, the tendency follows a more of a replacement mentality. If something breaks, replace it with something that works and move on. Don’t sit around worrying about it.
In New Zealand and Australia, however, things are different. In these countries, there is a tendency to fix things using whatever is on hand and to fix things only to the level that is absolutely required to solve the immediate problem. Newer, faster, ingenious techniques that get the job done are prioritized over solid or traditional processes and procedures.
This difference in mentality impacts how cloud vendors should talk to customers in these different locales. New Zealand and Australia eagerly adopted the cloud and newer cloud technologies because it was a new tool in their tool belt to help them fix their problems. In the United States, the cloud was a new and improved way of doing business and was also eagerly adopted.
In Europe, however, the cloud is seen as a new way of doing things that may or may not be better than the current way of doing things. A wait-and-see approach is more often adopted, and the cloud is used only when it is seen to solve a specific, measurable problem.
Which Cloud Is Most Important?
In the United States, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is clearly the favored cloud provider by all measures, but in recent years, questions about Microsoft Azure have been starting to pick up some steam. The same is true in Australia and New Zealand, where it seems that AWS is much more ingrained, and Microsoft Azure has not yet made significant headway into the mindset of the market.
However, in Europe and Great Britain, while AWS is still popular, Microsoft Azure is a part of almost every conversation I have with companies. It is the preferred cloud technology of most people I’ve talked to.
In all regions, there are a few companies in select industries that have what I call an “allergy to AWS.” This includes many retail or ecommerce companies that consider Amazon to be a competitor. This allergy discourages these companies from using AWS, and instead they focus on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This impact is strongest in the United States and in Europe, and seemingly less pervasive in Asia.
GCP rarely comes up in enterprise customer discussions, but when it does it’s mostly in companies with an “allergy to AWS.” IBM Cloud comes up in Europe, especially in the DACH region, but rarely elsewhere.
Important Technologies Differ
In each geography, there are different cloud technologies that have a different level of importance. Some of the differences include:
Private cloud
While private cloud was a popular buzzword early in the history of the cloud, it has become less significant and less pervasive across most of the world…except in Germany and other countries in the DACH region. In these countries, there is a strong focus on private cloud. This drive is primarily due to government, business, and consumer security and privacy concerns that companies in this region still see as a problem with the public cloud today. These concerns limit the ability of companies in this region to move to the public cloud, and hence putting private cloud capabilities in their own data centers becomes the next best option.
Containerization
While containerization is popular throughout the world, there is a specific increased interest in Great Britain and throughout continental Europe. In Great Britain and parts of Europe, it’s seen as a way to leverage Microsoft and Linux technologies together more easily.
Security
Cloud security is important to everyone. However, this was generally considered a known and solvable issue in most places I visited. In Germany, however, it was considered the primary issue inhibiting public cloud adoption.
DevOps and CI/CD
People were eager to discuss these topics in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. In DACH, these topics were less pervasive—not surprisingly, given their approach to cloud adoption.
Data Sovereignty Is Universal
There was one aspect of cloud computing that was universally important—data sovereignty. Data sovereignty is the desire to keep customer data located in the same country where the data is created and consumed.
There is simultaneously a strong need to:
Keep data local for performance reasons
For actively accessed data, latency is a major concern, especially in the Asia Pacific region, where latencies to other countries are traditionally higher. Having data geographically closer improves the customer experience significantly. This causes a focus in Asia Pacific to have data located in Asia Pacific cloud regions.
Have control over their data locally
Keeping control of all data is also of concern. Newly enacted laws and upcoming law changes are requiring companies to look at how data is stored and where it is stored. Increasingly, storing data out of region is considered a security and privacy issue.
Keep data out of the United States
This is a corollary to having data controlled locally. Even if data can’t be kept within a country’s boundaries, there is a growing need to keep the data out of the United States specifically. There is growing concern among international organizations that data stored within the United States is not private and not safe from prying eyes within the US government. This is a concern for backup and disaster recovery scenarios as well as for live and active data. These concerns were universal in all discussions in all countries outside of the United States.
My Take
It’s important to understand that the culture around cloud adoption is something that varies not just from one company to another but from one country to another. There are real and significant differences in how the cloud is seen and utilized in different parts of the world, and understanding these differences is important for people working across these geographic boundaries.
1 The DACH region is the countries of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.