Since January 2025, a series of events has made the risk of technological dependence on foreign suppliers a tangible and pressing reality. These include the tariff shock, Broadcom’s actions regarding VMware resulting in sudden cost increases, the threat to shut down Starlink in Ukraine, and geopolitical pressures concerning NATO and Greenland — each episode has added another piece to the puzzle. Within companies, the trajectory has been clear: from geopolitical concern, to evaluating exit strategies, right through to the concrete question that CIOs are now asking themselves — what would happen if a supplier cut us off from our most critical data overnight? Would my company remain operational and productive? In most cases, the answer would be no, and this is a problem of European system resilience that must be addressed,” Alessandro Cillario, Co-CEO and co-founder of Cubbit, tells Startupbusiness. “To do so, however, there has been no practical solution until now. Valid European technologies existed across the entire stack, but never as an integrated, ready-to-use package. Demand for sovereign solutions has grown, but an integrated offering was lacking. That is why we have teamed up with SUSE, Elemento Cloud and StorPool Storage — four companies founded and based in Italy, Germany, Luxembourg and Bulgaria — and built an initial suite of European solutions. The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Suite allows you to protect your most critical workloads from the ‘kill-switch’ risk in just a few hours, without affecting production and without replacing the entire infrastructure. The starting point is disaster recovery — a concrete and urgent need, to which we respond in a simple and practical way — but the logic is progressive: from there, we identify the workloads best suited to migrating to a European stack, then replicate and scale. It is not a leap of faith — it is a concrete step towards implementing a broader sovereign cloud strategy over time.”
The project was unveiled at the recent European Data Summit in Berlin, organised by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, where the four companies presented the first fully European and sovereign disaster recovery suite. The system is designed to ensure business continuity for organisations in the event of external and uncontrollable catastrophic events, including the potential sudden interruption of service by a foreign supplier. The suite also safeguards the data and operations of European businesses, whilst protecting them from dependence on foreign technological infrastructure.
The initiative offers European organisations a swift and practical response to an increasingly pressing question: which critical workloads should be migrated to a fully sovereign European software stack, and how can businesses begin doing so immediately, without disruption or service interruptions. Designed to manage disaster recovery scenarios, the suite also represents a concrete first step towards repatriating data and regaining control of workloads from foreign providers. To address IT managers’ concerns regarding the maturity of European alternatives and the risks associated with transferring operational workloads, this approach brings together products already available on the market, with established and proven quality, to offer a reliable, rapidly deployable solution tailored to the most critical business use cases.
The combined technologies come from companies founded and based in Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Bulgaria: this is testament to a successful collaboration between European companies listed in the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue, inspired by the EuroStack manifesto and vision.
The initiative addresses a growing gap in the European digital infrastructure market, where sovereign digital solutions face challenges on both the demand and supply sides. Demand is rising, driven by geopolitical uncertainty, stricter regulations and the need for greater control over critical data and services. Gartner forecasts that European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will grow 3.3-fold, from $6.9 billion in 2025 to $23.1 billion in 2027. At the same time, although the European technology ecosystem is becoming more visible and structured, many organisations still face the same challenge: whilst reliable, vertical European solutions exist across the entire stack, they are not always available as a single, integrated, ready-to-use option.
Inspired by EuroStack’s vision, the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Suite is designed to help bridge the gap between supply and demand. It combines complementary technologies ranging from storage to multi-cloud orchestration, networking, identity, observability and management, integrating European open-source and proprietary components into a single deployable stack, designed to reduce fragmentation and accelerate adoption. In just a few hours, the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Suite enables organisations to take concrete steps to reduce their reliance on non-European cloud infrastructure, without having to replace everything at once. Further integrations will follow, with the gradual roll-out of new use cases.
When a critical cloud dependency jeopardises the availability, accessibility or strategic sustainability of services or data — for example, in a kill-switch scenario that immediately cuts off access to the service — the recovery path is just as important as the production environment itself. The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Suite enables organisations to identify critical services, build and validate a sovereign recovery setup, and progressively extend it to other workloads through synchronisation and migration. It also offers a concrete path to support compliance with stringent frameworks such as NIS2, DORA, GDPR and regional regulations, whilst preserving full European sovereignty across the entire technology stack. In this way, disaster recovery becomes not only a measure of resilience, but also a concrete first step towards a broader sovereign cloud strategy.
The Sovrana Disaster Recovery Suite has already been adopted by an Italian IT service provider and, thanks to its open architecture, can be integrated by any organisation, including through direct on-premises deployment at customer sites across Europe. In the coming weeks, further partners – Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud and StorPool Storage – aim to integrate the solution into their own processes.
Andreas Prins, Global Head of Sovereign Solutions at SUSE, said in a statement: “True digital sovereignty cannot be built in isolation: it arises from a collaborative ecosystem of open and interoperable technologies. By combining SUSE’s enterprise-grade open-source foundations with the specialist expertise of our partners, we are demonstrating that Europe does not just have the building blocks — it has a complete, mission-critical stack.”
Gabriele Fronzé, CEO and co-founder of Elemento Cloud, adds: “Digital sovereignty in Europe has not been held back by a lack of technology, but by a lack of integration. Without orchestration, even the best technologies remain fragmented. Organisations do not need more components — they need control when it matters most. This initiative turns sovereignty into an operational reality, enabling a concrete exit from dependence on non-European infrastructure. Elemento makes all this possible through the first vendor-neutral control plane, Electros, and our hypervisor, AtomOS, which unify fragmented environments into a single, resilient system.”
Boyan Ivanov, CEO of StorPool Storage, emphasises that: “European organisations need robust, integrated and reliable sovereign IT solutions, developed by European companies, capable of guaranteeing security, business continuity and independence. The existing alternatives are few and fragmented, and with the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Suite we are helping to change that.” (photo by Nejc Soklič on Unsplash)
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