Cloud Sovereignty: Why EU Companies Need to Rethink Their Cloud Strategy Now

If you work in IT infrastructure in Europe, you have probably noticed a shift in the conversation over the past two years. Cloud sovereignty is no longer a niche topic for government agencies. It has moved to the top of the agenda for CISOs, CTOs, and engineering leads across regulated industries, financial services, and the public sector.

The reasons are not hard to find. The CLOUD Act gives US authorities the legal basis to request data stored by US-headquartered providers, regardless of where the servers are physically located. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework, while providing some relief, remains fragile. And with NIS2 now in effect across member states, organizations face real consequences for failing to demonstrate control over their critical infrastructure.

What Cloud Sovereignty Actually Means

Let me be clear: cloud sovereignty does not mean "move everything on-premise." That would be going backwards. It means having the ability to choose where your workloads run, which providers you use, and how your data is governed, without being locked into a single vendor's ecosystem.

In practice, this comes down to three things:

• Data residency: Keeping data within EU jurisdictions under EU legal frameworks
• Operational independence: Running infrastructure without depending on a single provider's proprietary tooling
• Portability: Being able to move workloads between providers or to on-premise environments

The real question is not "which cloud?" but "how dependent are we on any single one?"

Where Most Organizations Get Stuck

The challenge is not strategy. Most leadership teams understand the risk. The challenge is execution. Engineering teams have built years of muscle memory around AWS, Azure, or GCP. Services are tightly coupled to provider-specific APIs. Terraform modules reference provider-specific resources. CI/CD pipelines assume a single cloud target.

Unwinding this is not a weekend project. But it does not require a full rewrite either. The key is building vendor-agnostic capabilities step by step.

A Practical Path Forward

At Infralovers, we have been helping teams build exactly these capabilities for years. Our approach focuses on three pillars:

1. Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Terraform is vendor-agnostic by design. If your teams already use it, you are halfway there. If they use CloudFormation, ARM templates, or CDK, the migration to Terraform is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make for sovereignty.

We offer Terraform Foundations training and consulting to get teams productive quickly.

2. Kubernetes as the Portable Runtime

Kubernetes runs on every major cloud provider, on EU sovereign clouds like STACKIT, OVHcloud, and Ionos, and on-premise. Building your platform on Kubernetes means your applications can move. Combine this with GitOps and Crossplane for infrastructure management, and you have a genuinely portable platform.

Our Cloud Native Essentials and Crossplane Essentials courses cover this in depth.

3. Security and Compliance Built In

Sovereignty without compliance is incomplete. NIS2 and ISO 27001 require demonstrable controls over your infrastructure. We help teams implement vulnerability management, policy-as-code, and audit-ready configurations that work across any environment.

Key Takeaway: Cloud sovereignty is not a product you buy. It is a set of skills and architectural decisions that give you options.

Getting Started

If you are evaluating your organization's cloud sovereignty posture, here is where I would start:

1. Audit your provider dependencies: Which services are portable? Which lock you in?
2. Invest in Terraform and Kubernetes skills: These are the foundation of any multi-cloud strategy
3. Pick one workload and make it portable as a proof of concept
4. Build compliance controls that are provider-independent

We have put together a dedicated Cloud Sovereignty solution page with more detail on how we can support your journey.

As an IT consultant, I encourage you to start this conversation early. The organizations that act now will have options. The ones that wait will have constraints.

If this resonates, reach out to us at Infralovers. We are happy to discuss your specific situation.