By Data sovereignty isn’t binary. Blanket mandates—”all workloads must be sovereign” or “stay entirely on hyperscalers”—don’t map to business reality.
The Guest: Dirk Alshuth, CMO at emma
The Bottom Line
- Sovereignty exists on a spectrum—from hyperscaler sovereign offerings to European cloud providers like IONOS and OVHcloud to on-premises data centers—and enterprises need flexibility to deploy workloads based on data sensitivity without vendor lock-in
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Speaking with TFiR, Dirk Alshuth of emma defined the current state of cloud sovereignty in Europe and explained how enterprises are navigating GDPR compliance requirements without abandoning hyperscaler infrastructure entirely.
What Is Cloud Sovereignty?
Alshuth positioned sovereignty as a spectrum, not a binary choice. Different workloads require different levels of data residency and regulatory compliance. emma’s cloud operations platform enables enterprises to deploy infrastructure on providers of their choice—hyperscaler sovereign clouds, European providers like IONOS and OVHcloud, or on-premises environments—based on workload sensitivity.
Dirk Alshuth: “There are different layers of sovereignty, and every company has to choose what they need in terms of sovereignty. Where emma helps is by allowing companies to deploy infrastructure on providers of their choice. You can continue running applications in hyperscalers while placing other applications or workloads in more sovereign environments due to the sensitivity of the data.”
Broader Context
emma is a Luxembourg-based cloud operations platform founded in 2021 focused on distributed infrastructure management across multi-cloud, VMware, and Kubernetes environments. The company announced brownfield onboarding capabilities at KubeCon Europe 2026, enabling enterprises to govern existing infrastructure alongside new sovereign deployments without migration.
Alshuth emphasized that sovereignty requirements vary by workload. Hyperscaler sovereign cloud offerings like AWS and Azure’s European regions provide data residency guarantees while maintaining hyperscaler operational models. European cloud providers like IONOS and OVHcloud offer deeper sovereignty controls for workloads with stricter GDPR or regulatory requirements.
Dirk Alshuth: “I said ‘more sovereign’ because there are gradations to it. There are hyperscaler sovereign clouds in Europe, where you have a certain level of data residency and sovereignty associated with them, or you can work with European cloud providers like IONOS, OVHcloud, and others, where you operate in a more sovereign environment.”
emma’s platform consolidates governance, cost management, and deployment workflows across all infrastructure types under a unified control plane, allowing enterprises to implement sovereignty policies selectively without rearchitecting existing hyperscaler workloads.
Watch the full TFiR interview with Dirk Alshuth here.
