Planetek’s satellites sweep across continents, collecting breathtaking images. But even from space, the Italian company’s cameras can’t detect the political borders that now dictate where and how European data must be stored, managed, and secured.
Those unseen lines are presenting new challenges for IT teams, who must manage cloud services they rely on and regional regulations, some of which are enforced by laws like the new EU AI Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Companies that conduct business in Europe and fail to comply face stiff penalties, intense scrutiny, and pressure to adjust their cloud strategies.
For Planetek, the signal was clear. Its leaders decided to get ahead of the trend by signing a deal with Italy’s Cubbit, a geo-distributed cloud storage enabler, to build a sovereign storage platform that will enable it to bring much of its most critical geospatial data back home, where it could be more directly controlled. When complete, the system will support the company’s full operational cycle, from data collection and transformation to secure information sharing.
“We didn’t know exactly where our data was when we used global cloud providers, and we needed to change that,” Sergio Samarelli, CTO at Planetek, told The Forecast.
“So, we are adding capabilities to be fully in control of some of our data.”
A New Cloud Reality
Planetek isn’t alone. Gartner predicts that by 2030 more than 75% of European and Middle Eastern enterprises will geopatriate their workloads to reduce geopolitical risk.
Geopatriation, a term Gartner defined, refers to moving company data and applications out of global public clouds and into local options such as sovereign clouds, regional cloud providers, or an organization’s own data centers due to perceived geopolitical risk. Gartner said cloud sovereignty, once limited to banks and governments, now extends to a wide range of organizations amid global instability and a desire to reduce reliance on global cloud providers.
Organizations concerned about such issues should take responsibility for their digital destiny, Gartner said.
“Shifting workloads to providers with an increased sovereignty posture can help CIOs gain more control over data residency, compliance, and governance,” said Gene Alvarez, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, in a statement.
“This greater control may improve alignment with local regulations and build trust with customers who are concerned about data privacy or national interests.”
Where Laws Collide
The sovereignty push also reflects rising legal friction between U.S. access requirements and Europe’s data protection rules. Many European CTOs are wary of hyperscalers being compelled under the U.S. Cloud Act to grant government authorities access to data wherever it is stored, a scenario that could expose companies to EU law violations.
“An American company needs to give access to the United States government on request,” Samarelli said. “This process is simply not compliant with European regulation.”
That realization is fueling the push toward geopatriation and prompting hyperscalers to implement sovereign cloud plans across Europe. A sovereign cloud is a cloud computing environment that is designed to ensure that all data, including applications, stored data, and data that travels across networks, is stored, processed, and managed within a certain country or region and is in compliance with the data sovereignty laws and regulations of that country.
Microsoft is reviving a national-cloud model in Europe. It’s offering isolated Azure regions in markets such as France that operate separately from the global Azure backbone. Google is expanding its “sovereign cloud” partnerships with European service providers to offer locally operated environments that keep administrative control inside the EU. And AWS is working with on sovereign cloud frameworks in Europe that limit operator access and tighten control over how data is handled and audited.
In late 2025, hybrid multicloud software company Nutanix released a distributed sovereign cloud (DSC) offering for enterprises that want unified control over deploying and managing their infrastructure across distributed IT environments that run virtual machines (VM) and containerized (cloud native) applications.
“These new capabilities give customers the clarity and control needed to draw their own sovereign boundaries across distributed environments and leverage the resiliency and flexibility that distributed clouds provide,” Thomas Cornely, Nutanix EVP of Product Management, told Blocks and Files.
For biopharmaceutical company LFB Group, data sovereignty and compliance are critical. In a press release, Paul Bodet, CTO of LFB Group, said his company uses Nutanix and OVHcloud to modernise our infrastructure while ensuring our sensitive data remains in a trusted European cloud. This combination allows us to simplify operations, strengthen resilience, and continue delivering innovation in healthcare with full confidence in security and compliance.”
Sovereignty Cloud Build Out
Azure serves a large share of Europe’s enterprise and public-sector workloads. Company President Brad Smith wrote in a recent blog that Microsoft plans to increase European capacity by 40% over the next two years and expand data center operations in 16 European countries, effectively doubling its overall European data center capacity by 2027.
In France, for example, Microsoft partnered with Capgemini and Orange to launch the “Bleu” national cloud joint venture. Smith stated that the company is partnering with SAP and Arvato Systems (a Bertelsmann IT company) to create a sovereign cloud platform for the German public sector, hosted in German data centers and operated by German personnel.
“Most of what Microsoft has done so far feels like compliance positioning,” Joey D’Antoni, a principal architect at 3Cloud who has written extensively about Microsoft’s approach in Europe, told The Forecast. “If they were to legitimately partner with someone and stand up a new data center, I would buy it a lot more.”
EU Companies Take the Wheel
Until that happens, companies like Planetek are seeking their own local solutions but D’Antoni noted they “lack the maturity and ecosystems of the Big 3” hyperscalers. He said these European providers are more like colocation services that offer data center and network services, along with high-performance computing and some cloud services.
“There are not a whole lot of great, easy answers here,” D’Antoni said. “Once you start relying on software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings, it gets really hard to unwind. The challenge for most companies is figuring out what they can realistically bring home and what they simply can’t.”
The Geopatriation Playbook
For enterprises watching these mixed signals from hyperscalers amid rising regulatory pressures at home, the question becomes: what to do next? Both D’Antoni and Samarelli offered clear guidance for organizations evaluating whether to bring workloads closer to home.
First, decide what truly requires local control. Customer requirements, regulatory mandates, and classification policies matter more than broad fears about cloud location. Samarelli said Planetek evaluates each data set individually and brings local only what demands full control.
Second, understand that not everything can be moved. D’Antoni emphasized that workloads built on software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings pose deep technical challenges because enterprises may lack the skills or alternative tools to run those services locally.
Finally, he recommends preparing early. Even partial repatriation requires time, infrastructure planning, and clarity about what success looks like. The worst position for a CIO is to wait until regulators or major customers force a sudden shift.
As European regulators tighten expectations and geopolitical pressures grow, the need for early, deliberate action becomes increasingly critical. For Planetek, the decision to begin now rather than later proved to be the most logical path, Samarelli said.
"We feel in control of our data,” he said.
“We are prepared to store it wherever necessary, whether in a hyperscaler datacenter on any continent or in a specific satellite orbiting storage, potentially with redundancy on specific servers under our physical and logical control.”
Editor’s note: Learn how to secure data, help ensure compliance and architect resilient systems without vendor lock-in or geopolitical risk.
David Rand is a business and technology reporter whose work has appeared in major publications around the world. He specializes in spotting and digging into what’s coming next–and helping executives in organizations of all sizes know what to do about it.
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