Distributed by Default.
Governed by Design.
The average organisation operates across hyperscalers, sovereign clouds, AI-optimised providers, and on-premises infrastructure — connected by contracts and APIs, but without a coherent operating model.
This IDC InfoBrief draws on research across 1,155 European organisations to examine what that condition costs, what three converging infrastructure shifts are exposing — and what it takes to make distributed infrastructure governable as a single system.
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Sovereignty becomes operational
GDPR, NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act are no longer checkbox exercises. They require continuous proof that workloads run where policy says they should — across every provider, every region, every deployment.
AI infrastructure is ungoverned
GPUs are provisioned across multiple providers. Training data moves between clouds. Inference endpoints span regions. None of it is governed by the same model as the rest of the estate. AI workloads have created a parallel infrastructure world without operational controls.
Cloud 3.0 breaks cloud tooling
Each new provider adds another console, another billing surface, another compliance model. The tools built for one or two clouds cannot govern four or five.
IDC's forward-looking data on how enterprises are responding to the structural gap.
The InfoBrief maps the structural gap. The fireside chat explores what to do about it.
Governing distributed
AI infrastructure in Europe
emma CEO Dmitry Panenkov and IDC VP Carla Arend discuss the InfoBrief findings live — what the data reveals, where enterprises fall short, and what the operating model needs to look like. [Here] Download the infobrief and be among the first to access the fireside chat.
