Leaving the hyperscalers: the server is never the problem

The calculation usually used to justify a cloud move is the wrong one. It compares server prices, and there European providers have been competitive to cheaper for years.

The effort sits elsewhere: in the managed services. Queues, databases, serverless functions, identity management, event processing, search — everything you click on with one provider and assemble with another.

So the right first question is not "what does the server cost?" but "how many managed services are on our invoice, and which of them have an open equivalent?"

The inventory

Take last month's invoice and write down every line that is not pure compute, storage or transfer. For each, note two things: what it is used for, and whether there is an open building block you could operate yourself.

The distribution is roughly this. One group has an obvious equivalent — object storage, databases, message queues. A second has one that creates operational work, because with the previous provider nobody had to maintain it. And a third, usually smaller group is genuine attachment: services with no equivalent outside that provider.

That third group is your actual decision. Everything else is work with a number attached.

A morning is enough for this list, and it doubles as your effort estimate.

What is on the table

Hetzner (Germany) sets the price anchor everyone else is measured against. The managed-service catalogue is thin — if you use three hyperscaler building blocks today, here you build them.

IONOS (Germany) runs its own data centres and offers S3-compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes and a BSI C5 attestation.

StackIT (Germany) comes out of a retail group that built its own IT far enough to sell it. Anyone who thinks of European infrastructure purely in terms of funding programmes is missing where the substance came from.

OVHcloud (France) is Europe's largest provider — and the case with the most to learn from. In the 2021 Strasbourg fire, customers without cross-site backups lost their data. Geo-redundancy there is a line item you order, not a default. Check that with every provider, the large ones included.

Scaleway (France), Exoscale (Switzerland), Cleura (Sweden), UpCloud (Finland) and Elastx (Sweden) cover the rest depending on region and requirement.

The special case worth knowing

Delos Cloud is an SAP subsidiary, built for German public administration, operated by German staff — and technically running on licensed Microsoft Azure technology. The sovereignty comes from the contract and the operating model, not from independent technology.

That can be an entirely correct decision: operating models are robust, and for many organisations the familiarity of the platform is worth the difference. You should simply know which kind of safety you bought, before the situation arrives in which the difference counts — sanctions, say, or a withdrawn licence. That distinction is the heart of what a Sovereign cloud actually means.

What the Data Act changes

Since September 2025, switching charges for data processing services are limited to costs actually incurred and disappear entirely from January 2027. Notice periods are capped, the transition has defined windows, and providers must cooperate.

The egress fees that used to push an export into five figures are therefore no longer an argument. Anyone still saying "we cannot afford to look into it" is calculating with the day before yesterday's numbers.

The realistic path

Nobody moves a grown landscape in one step. The usual route is a second location for a bounded part — one service, one environment, one team — run in parallel for a quarter.

Afterwards you have three things: a defensible effort figure, a list of the services that create real attachment, and a negotiating position for the next contract. The third is often worth more than the saving.