The US CLOUD Act does not stop at the US border. If your cloud provider is American, your data is within reach of US authorities, wherever it is physically hosted.

For DACH enterprises, this is not a theoretical concern. Under the US CLOUD Act, American cloud providers can be compelled to disclose data stored anywhere in the world, including on servers physically located in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or Zurich. GDPR and DSGVO place the compliance burden on the data controller, which is you, not your cloud provider. That creates a legal tension that cannot be resolved by pointing to a data processing agreement with an American hyperscaler.

The implications are practical. Boards and audit committees in regulated sectors are asking whether workloads running on AWS, Azure, or GCP are genuinely compliant with European data protection obligations. Clients in financial services, healthcare, and public sector are beginning to require contractual guarantees of EU-only data processing. In regulated industries with hard jurisdictional requirements - Swiss financial regulation, German BSI C5, healthcare data residency - the question is not whether to migrate. It is how to do it without disrupting live operations.

Gradion helps DACH enterprises assess their sovereignty exposure, evaluate alternatives, and execute migrations to EU-sovereign cloud environments. Our work is engineering-led and compliance-aware, not a checkbox exercise.

WHAT WE DELIVER

Cloud Sovereignty Assessment

We audit your current cloud environment across three dimensions. First, regulatory requirements: which data categories you process, which sector-specific obligations apply (DSGVO, DORA, HIPAA-equivalent frameworks, BSI C5), and what your current hosting arrangements actually deliver. Second, risk and impact: where data exposure creates compliance or reputational risk, which workloads are most sensitive, and what your contractual exposure looks like under CLOUD Act scenarios. Third, cost and migration complexity: a realistic estimate of what migration would require, workload by workload, with financial projections. The output is an executive-ready assessment that gives boards and CIOs a clear view of where they stand and what their options are.

Sovereign Cloud Provider Evaluation

We evaluate EU-sovereign and European-operated cloud providers on your behalf, including STACKIT (the Schwarz Group cloud, purpose-built for GDPR-compliant enterprise workloads), Hetzner, IONOS, OVHcloud, T-Systems Open Telekom Cloud, Deutsche Telekom, and certified public sector clouds. Provider selection is based on your technical requirements, compliance obligations, geographic needs, and cost targets. We are not partnered with providers in ways that create selection bias. The evaluation is yours.

Migration Design and Execution

We design phased migration roadmaps that minimize business disruption while moving workloads to compliant environments. Architecture adaptation, network topology changes, and identity and access reconfiguration are handled with the same engineering rigour as the compliance rationale. We use proven playbooks developed across cloud migration engagements spanning Germany, Singapore, Thailand, and Egypt. Guardrails for cost, compliance posture, and security are put in place before migration begins and monitored continuously after.

GDPR/DSGVO Architecture Patterns

Sovereignty is not only about where data is hosted. It is about how data flows, who can access it, and how that access is governed and audited. We design data residency patterns that ensure personal data stays within defined geographic boundaries, implement encryption and key management that keeps cryptographic control in European hands, and configure audit logging that satisfies both DSGVO accountability obligations and internal governance requirements.

Ongoing Compliance Monitoring

Sovereignty posture degrades when new services are added without review, when engineers provision resources in unchecked regions, or when vendor relationships change. We implement policy-as-code controls that enforce sovereignty constraints continuously, alerting on drift before it becomes a compliance event. Configuration is version-controlled and auditable.

Proof in Production

A Swiss banking technology provider running more than 300 core banking applications for dozens of retail banks across Switzerland operates under FINMA data sovereignty requirements: all systems must remain within Swiss jurisdiction. There is no negotiating with a hyperscaler’s regional data centre commitment when the regulator has drawn a hard line on where data can physically reside.

Gradion conducted a full architecture audit across the client’s application estate, defined a regulation-compliant hybrid cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud within Swiss boundaries, and delivered a sequenced migration plan in 8 weeks - with zero tolerance for downtime and zero regulatory missteps. Staff training and Instant Payments compliance preparation were built into the same engagement. The result: a cloud-native architecture that satisfies FINMA, supports 500,000 daily transactions, and is prepared for the Swiss interbank Instant Payments mandate.

CTA

Describe your current cloud setup and the compliance questions you are facing. We will scope a sovereignty assessment and have findings in three weeks.