French cloud services provider OVHcloud has started the process for a potential initial public offering in Paris, a company spokeswoman has confirmed. The first company challenge ahead of that move however is to get its Strasbourg data centre campus back up and running, after one of its data centres was destroyed in a fire this Wednesday morning.
OVHcloud competes against Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure in both the European market and globally, and its services - joined with others from European providers - are being promoted by both the company and European politicians as a way of building a “European cloud”.
Such a cloud, they say, would allow European companies to better protect their customers' data under GDPR and other laws - free of US data grab laws such as the US Patriot Act and the US Cloud Act.
The OVHcloud spokeswoman confirmed the IPO plan to Reuters. Meanwhile, OVHcloud's SBG2 data centre in Strasbourg has been destroyed by a fire which also damaged SBG1.
No one was hurt in the fire, but all four data centres on the site will be closed today. The company has advised customers to activate their disaster recovery plans.
The fire broke out just after midnight on Wednesday morning and took six hours to bring under control, with more than 100 firefighters at the scene.
The SBG3 and SBG4 data centres were protected by firefighters.
Picture source: @abonin_DNA
