Europe’s cloud market hangs on a handful of US hyperscalers. For many companies that’s a risk — regulatory, geopolitical, and in terms of data sovereignty. While the EU’s Gaia-X project wrestles with itself, the Schwarz Group has brought a concrete, operational answer to market with STACKIT — built in the Heilbronn region, right on our doorstep.
Who Is Behind STACKIT
STACKIT is run by the Schwarz Group — the parent company of Lidl and Kaufland — out of Neckarsulm. Strong regional partners such as EnBW and Würth sit alongside it. The ambition is stated plainly: maximum data sovereignty for companies that don’t want their data exposed to US jurisdiction.
What STACKIT Offers
- Operation in European data centres under European law
- Infrastructure built on OpenStack
- Compute, storage and networking as core building blocks
- Kubernetes and managed databases for modern workloads
- Colocation and infrastructure services for hybrid scenarios
The decisive difference from the global providers is less the feature breadth than the jurisdiction: data and operations stay reliably within the European legal space — an argument that gains weight with GDPR, NIS2 and growing sensitivity to cloud sovereignty.
Who STACKIT Pays Off For
STACKIT is particularly interesting for German mid-sized companies wary of US providers processing their data, as well as for organisations with high data-sovereignty requirements — in the public sector, healthcare, or regulated industries.
That doesn’t mean STACKIT replaces the hyperscalers in every scenario. If you need a very broad range of managed PaaS services or global edge presence, you’ll find gaps. The honest answer is usually not an either/or but an architecture decision: which workloads belong sovereignly in Europe, and which may run globally?
How Cloud Cape Helps
We evaluate cloud platforms vendor-neutrally — along your requirements for sovereignty, compliance, cost and feature breadth, not along partner commissions. In our Consulting & Project Management engagements we assess which workloads belong with a sovereign provider like STACKIT and which stay with a hyperscaler.
Talk to us about Consulting & Project Management — we’ll help you weigh sovereignty and feature breadth against each other cleanly.