The market is shifting. Sovereignty is the new standard.

GDPR, Schrems II, the invalidation of Privacy Shield, and the ongoing uncertainty around the EU-US Data Privacy Framework have created a clear market signal: European organisations can no longer depend on US-based infrastructure providers. The legal risk of storing European data on US-controlled infrastructure is now a board-level concern. This is not a niche — it is the entire European market recalibrating.

Managed service providers optimise for volume — hundreds of clients, standardised configurations, ticket queues, and tiered support. This model works for commodity IT. It fails for infrastructure that requires deep engineering expertise. As organisations move toward private cloud, air-gapped environments, and sovereign infrastructure, the MSP model becomes not just inadequate but actively harmful — creating security gaps, configuration drift, and unaccountable escalation chains.

Proxmox over VMware. OpenBao over HashiCorp. Zitadel over Entra ID. Wazuh over Splunk. The open source alternatives to proprietary enterprise software have reached production parity — and in many cases, surpassed the proprietary offerings in security, auditability, and total cost of ownership. Organisations that build on open source own their infrastructure. Those that build on proprietary stacks rent it — and the rent keeps increasing.

Every European organisation that handles personal data, every government agency with sovereignty requirements, every company migrating off VMware after the Broadcom acquisition, every business that needs infrastructure but cannot depend on US cloud providers — this is the market. It is not a startup niche. It is the future of European infrastructure engineering.