Signal Gartner predicts European and Middle Eastern firms will repatriate workloads to reduce geopolitical risk

Summary

Gartner's tenth strategic trend for 2026, summarised by KISDI, is geopatriation. The term refers to moving corporate data and applications out of global public clouds to regional cloud providers or company-owned data centres in order to escape geopolitical threats. Shifting workloads to suppliers that offer stronger data sovereignty gives CIOs more control over data management, compliance and governance. That control can in turn improve regulatory compliance and help build customer trust, including in the protection of personal information. Gartner predicts that by 2030 more than 75 percent of enterprises in Europe and the Middle East will move virtual workloads back to their home jurisdictions using solutions designed to reduce geopolitical risk.