One hour of downtime can cost far more than lost revenue. It includes productivity loss, contractual exposure, regulatory risk under GDPR and NIS2, insurance implications and leadership accountability. For many mid-sized organisations, the cost of downtime can reach tens of thousands per hour. The real risk is not the outage itself, but whether you can prove you are able to recover quickly and responsibly.
In boardrooms across Europe, conversations about infrastructure are increasingly focused on control. Control over cost, over operational risk, and over recoverability. The question is no longer whether backups exist. The real question is whether recovery can be proven under pressure.
Data sovereignty used to sound like a public-sector discussion. It now shows up in board meetings, procurement requirements, and risk registers across regulated industries. The reason is straightforward: dependency risk is no longer theoretical. When an organisation relies heavily on one ecosystem for identity, email, documents, and daily workflows, it also inherits the impact if that ecosystem becomes constrained—commercially, operationally, or legally.
Two recent developments show the direction of travel. The European Commission has been reported to trial a “sovereign” backup option for internal communications based on the open-source Matrix protocol. In the Netherlands, the Algemene Rekenkamer stated it wants to move away from Microsoft cloud services, while acknowledging such a move takes time.
