At this year’s InCyber 2026 Forum, OVHcloud made a move that, behind the scenes in the European technology sector, had long been anticipated. The French cloud giant announced a significant expansion of its presence in the defence sector, directly challenging the dominance of US cloud providers in the most sensitive segments of the market.
The strategy outlined by Octave Klaba is an attempt to respond to the growing paradox of the European armed forces: the need for instant digitalisation while being deeply dependent on technology from outside the Old Continent. In an age of real-time operations and massive integration of AI systems, control over infrastructure is becoming the same as strategic autonomy.
The key to OVHcloud’s success is said to be deployment flexibility. The company promotes a distributed cloud model, including its proprietary OPCP solution, which allows a full-scale cloud platform to be installed directly in the customer’s data centres. For the military, this means access to state-of-the-art analytical tools without having to take data outside the physical perimeter of units. The whole is based on a foundation of certifications such as SecNumCloud, which in the European regulatory system is a pass to handle the most sensitive information.
However, technology is only half the battle. OVHcloud is betting on ‘militarising’ its staff. The company has announced a plan to aggressively recruit experts drawn directly from the armed forces and defence sector across Europe. These dedicated teams are expected not only to design systems architecture, but also to have the necessary security clearances to work on projects with ‘secret’ status.
