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?
Whichever provider you choose, operations remain the actual work: patch levels, permissions and configuration stay your responsibility with a European provider too. See Cloud Patch Management.
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.