Most European businesses now say geopolitical tensions between the US and Europe are a factor in their technology purchasing decisions. In fact, new research from Proton, which recently launched a business continuity solution to help European organisations stay operational when their primary stack fails, reveals a significant, largely unaddressed gap between the operational risks businesses face and their readiness to manage them.
The findings arrive at a moment when technology dependency has become a strategic concern. Businesses that have built their operations around a small number of dominant US-based platforms for email, file storage, communication and collaboration now face a question once considered hypothetical: what happens if that access is suddenly withdrawn?
A risk that has moved to the top of the corporate agenda
European businesses have no illusions about their dependence. Nearly three in four respondents (73.9%) say they are at least somewhat concerned about a government-imposed kill switch cutting off access to their US technology providers. Just one in 20 are not concerned at all.
The nature of the concern is as important as its scale. Businesses are not distinguishing between a criminal cyberattack and a politically motivated access restriction: concern about kill switches is virtually indistinguishable from concern about ransomware and cyberattacks (74.9%). Both sit alongside each other on corporate risk registers. Both are treated as existential operational threats.
Crucially, businesses are not merely concerned, they are prepared to act. A clear majority (67.8%) say they would switch to an alternative provider if a government-imposed kill switch blocked their access, with UK businesses the most willing to move (74.4%), followed by Germany (68%) and France (61%). Yet for most, that readiness remains reactive rather than planned. Only 44% have a business continuity plan that is both documented and regularly tested, meaning the majority would be switching under pressure, without a tested fallback in place.
Raphaël Auphan, Chief Operating Officer at Proton, said: “The kill switch is no longer an abstract geopolitical concern but a business continuity crisis. The study captures a clear shift in how European businesses perceive operational risk. The fact that concern about a government-imposed kill switch is virtually indistinguishable from concern about ransomware tells something significant: geopolitical risk applied to digital dependence is no longer a boardroom abstraction. It is joining the same threat register as criminal attacks, with the same sense of urgency and the same expectation that it could materialise without warning.”
Most businesses could not withstand a single day of disrupted digital access
The concern is proportionate to the exposure. When asked how long they could keep operating without cloud and digital services, more than half of businesses (54.5%) say they could not survive beyond a single business day before being forced to shut down. For these organisations, a kill switch would represent not a manageable disruption but an immediate operational crisis.
The operational consequences are consistent across sectors. The top two impacts of a sudden loss of access are identical across all markets surveyed: employees unable to stay productive (36%) and inability to serve or support customers (36%).
The study also demonstrates that financial exposure scales sharply with organisation size. Most small businesses estimate losses of €5,000–€9,999. Medium businesses shift meaningfully upwards, with nearly half landing in the €10,000–49,999 range. For large businesses, the stakes are of an entirely different order: 44.8% expect to lose more than €50,000 from a single day of downtime and more than one in four (28.7%) expect losses exceeding €100,000. Being bigger does not provide a buffer. It raises the cost of failure.
Businesses have experienced disruption before and they are ready to act
Disruption is not hypothetical for European businesses. Every respondent in the study reported experiencing at least one type of disruption in the past 12 months, from outages to cyberattacks to loss of access to a service. Businesses expect this to continue.
Most organisations have some form of continuity planning in place: 44% have a continuity plan that is both documented and regularly tested, 36% have one that exists but is not regularly tested and 13% maintain an informal, undocumented plan.
Companies have invested most heavily in protecting the two services most commonly disrupted: email (33.6%) and cloud file storage (28.3%). Both emerge as the top priorities for business continuity fallback solutions.
To address this risk, Proton offers a business continuity solution that keeps organisations operational when their primary stack is disrupted or cut off. Pre-provisioned accounts can be activated instantly, giving teams immediate access to the tools they need so internal communications and client-facing operations can resume without delay, all running on independent European infrastructure. Setup is straightforward, and switching over in a crisis is as simple as updating one setting.
