Module 5 / 7

Opportunities

Markets, jobs and sectors

10 min

Data and the cloud are at once infrastructure, a market and a cross-cutting skill: every sector depends on them, but few organisations yet know how to use them well.

$850bnCloud$450bnAnalytics€500bn+EU data
Cloud, analytics and the European data economy.

5.1The macroeconomic order of magnitude

  • Cloud: about $850 billion of public cloud spending in 2026 according to Gartner, heading beyond a trillion within the decade.
  • Data analytics: a global market of around $450 billion in 2026, with strong growth.
  • The European data economy: about €500 to 550 billion, nearly 4% of EU GDP.
  • The AI engine: nearly a fifth of cloud spending is already linked to AI.
$850bn
Estimated global public cloud spending in 2026
$450bn
Global data analytics market, order of magnitude for 2026
€500bn+
The European data economy

5.2Jobs: a field short of talent

  • Technical: data analyst, data engineer, data scientist, cloud architect, DevOps, platform engineer, FinOps.
  • Governance: data steward, DPO, data governance lead.
  • Public policy: open data, government data administration, GDPR, Data Act, the state's cloud strategy.

5.3Opportunities by sector

  • Health: EHDS, Health Data Hub, personalised medicine under sovereignty constraints.
  • Public sector: open data, digitisation, proactive administration.
  • Industry 4.0: sensors, digital twins, predictive maintenance.
  • Finance, marketing, retail: customer insight, fraud, pricing.
  • Environment: satellite data, energy optimisation.

5.4Who captures the value?

  • Hyperscalers: the toll booths of the digital world.
  • Data SaaS: turning infrastructure into use.
  • Consulting and integration: supporting adoption.
  • FinOps: reducing and steering exploding spending.
  • Sovereign: SecNumCloud and migrating sensitive data.
Key takeaway for entrepreneurs

Defensible value does not lie in off-the-shelf technology, but in proprietary data, domain integration and compliance. Two opportunities: simplifying GDPR/Data Act/NIS2 for SMEs and supporting sovereign migration.

Sources

Gartner, cloud forecasts; Fortune Business Insights, Big Data Analytics Market; European Commission, Building a Data Economy.

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