Our VivaTech 2026 Takeaways: Are “serious industries” finally getting serious about the cloud?

When caution becomes a cloud strategy

Cloud adoption used to be seen as a binary.

The cloud was for the fast-moving: digital-native companies and industries where being first was paramount and speed mattered more than institutional caution. Meanwhile, the most sensitive sectors like healthcare, the public sector, finance, defence, or critical infrastructure, were expected to keep operating in-house, protected by regulation, legacy systems, and a deeply rational fear of losing control.

In other words, innovation was for the cloud. Seriousness was for on-premise.

That distinction no longer holds.

Over the past few years, we at Scaleway have seen first-hand customers across some of the most sensitive industries move more and more of their workflows and data to the cloud. The reasons for this are clear.

Cloud has matured: trusted providers can now meet the security, compliance, resilience, and control requirements that critical workloads demand. Legacy systems, meanwhile, are reaching their limits: they are costly to maintain, harder to scale, and too slow for the pace of modernization now expected in every sector. AI is raising the stakes further, creating new needs for deployment speed. And regulation is giving organizations a clearer framework for what trusted cloud adoption should look like.

This shift is particularly visible in two sectors we know well at Scaleway: healthcare, and public institutions. These are not easy markets, nor should they be. They deal with critical services, sensitive data, and strict regulatory constraints.

Precisely for that reason, their move toward cloud says something important about how much the category has changed.

Healthcare

Healthcare has always had strong reasons to be cautious about the cloud.

After all, few sectors handle data as sensitive as patient records. Few operate under such strict regulatory scrutiny. And few can afford downtime, ambiguity, or loss of control when the systems involved directly affect care delivery.

That is why healthcare long seemed like the perfect example of a sector that would stay on-premise by default. But that assumption is becoming harder to defend.

In April this year, Scaleway was selected as the sovereign provider to France’s Plateforme des Données de Santé (formerly known as the Health Data Hub). In June, Scaleway was selected by ADLIN Science to support ALLIANCE SANTÉ IA, the €14.9 million France 2030-backed consortium led with Montpellier University Hospital to build France’s first AI-augmented hospital.

For healthcare, the signal is clear: cloud is no longer just a modernization tool, but a foundation for bringing new capabilities into care delivery and research. For organizations, that means scaling securely, collaborating more easily, and accelerating data-driven workflows; for patients, it means faster, more personalized, and more resilient care.

Public institutions

Public institutions face a similar tension.

Like healthcare, they routinely handle some of the most sensitive information there is — from identity and taxation, to social programs, education, justice, and emergency services. And like healthcare, they operate under a level of scrutiny few private organizations ever face.

For a long time, that made in-house infrastructure feel like the safer default. But here too, the limits are becoming clear. Public institutions are expected to deliver faster, more reliable, more accessible digital services, while dealing with growing cybersecurity threats, rising infrastructure costs, and increasingly complex regulatory requirements.

That is why the recent shift matters. Public institutions are not moving to cloud because the constraints have disappeared. They are moving because trusted cloud providers can now help meet those constraints.

On this front too, we’ve seen strong momentum at Scaleway.

In November last year, Scaleway was selected to contribute to the European Central Bank’s digital euro initiative as part of a consortium led by Senacor. We will specifically support the Secure Exchange of Payment Information (SEPI) component, a core building block of the project’s architecture.

Then in April this year, Scaleway was selected as one of four cloud providers under the European Commission’s Cloud III Dynamic Purchasing System, a €180 million procurement programme enabling EU institutions, bodies and agencies to access sovereign cloud services over a period of up to six years. This followed an evaluation conducted by the European Commission under its Cloud Sovereignty Framework, which rigorously assesses providers across key objectives spanning legal, operational and technological dimensions.

We have made similar progress at a more local level: we started working not only with the City of Toulouse, France but also with the City of Copenhagen — Denmark’s largest employer, with a force of over 45,000 civil servants.

Taken together, these partnerships are proof that forward-looking administrators are no longer treating technological control as a reason to avoid the cloud, but as a reason to choose the right one.

Institutional trust compounds

The importance of public-sector adoption goes beyond public institutions themselves. Historically, the largest US cloud providers scaled in part because government contracts gave them predictable revenue, demanding requirements to build against, and a powerful signal to the rest of the market: if this infrastructure could be trusted for sensitive public workloads, it could be trusted elsewhere too.

Europe now has an opportunity to create the same dynamic on its own terms.

Public-sector adoption is not just another vertical. It is a market in its own right, and a trust signal for the rest of the economy. The European Commission estimates that public cloud revenues across the EU-27 could reach €320 billion by 2030, with the public sector accounting for roughly 14% of demand. And once sovereignty requirements are factored in, a significant share of that market becomes addressable only by EU-controlled providers.

That signal then travels. When European providers are selected for highly sensitive applications, it becomes easier for private companies in regulated sectors to make the same choice.

This matters because public and private demand are much more deeply connected than they may appear. At Scaleway, we already work with a myriad of private companies whose ideal customers happen to be from the public sector.

Galeon, for example, develops an AI-powered electronic health record SaaS platform that helps hospitals streamline care workflows across specialties and structure patient data for research. Orasio’s video intelligence platform is used by cities and internal security forces, making it another example of private-sector innovation serving public-sector needs. Then, there is ChapsVision, Europe’s sovereign agentic AI and data intelligence champion (and one of our latest partners at Scaleway), whose platform is used by the German and French security agencies.
In cloud, credibility compounds. The more European providers prove themselves in the most demanding environments, the easier it becomes for serious industries to move with confidence.

The new standard for serious cloud

Serious industries were never against the cloud. They were against losing control.

What has changed is that cloud can now meet them where they are: with stronger guarantees, clearer rules, and infrastructure built for sensitive workloads from the start. For healthcare providers, public institutions, and the companies serving them, this turns cloud from a risk into an enabler.

Not every workload will move overnight. Not every organization will make the same choices at the same pace. But what is clear is that the industries with the highest standards are no longer standing outside the cloud. They are helping raise the bar for everyone.

At Scaleway, this is exactly where we intend to build: alongside the organizations whose requirements are hardest to meet, because they are also the ones pushing the category forward.

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Explore the full VivaTech takeaways

At VivaTech 2026, one question stood out: how can Europe remain competitive by building and scaling more of its technology at home?

Our executive briefing brings together the key insights from four days of discussions on cloud, AI, infrastructure, and digital sovereignty — and explores what they mean for Europe’s technology ecosystem.

Download the Scaleway Briefing: VivaTech 2026 Takeaways.