Digital sovereignty for MSPs: why your clients are not asking for it yet

Digital sovereignty is, for the average MSP in the Netherlands, a conversation that stalls at the coffee machine within two minutes. Nobody calls because their data sits in America. They call when Outlook is down. And yet a shift is coming that will hit your business hard in three years if you do nothing now.

The figures show where we stand. Recent research among end users has around 68% of organisations saying they see sovereignty as a non-subject. Only 20% believe they are not sovereign with their data. Translate that to your client portfolio: of every ten mid-sized clients, eight do not lose sleep over where their mail sits. Higher up, at governments, large banks and insurers, it does play. But that does not sit in the books of an MSP of 25 to 40 people.

That is exactly where the discomfort sits. On the tender side the question “what is your EU stack” is now on the table, including at smaller municipalities. On the commercial side nobody asks. You are a reseller of Microsoft, AWS or Google, your clients were trained in that stack, and so were your engineers. And then someone comes by with a book and a story about the Cloud Act, and you hear yourself thinking: nice for defence, but what do I do with this on Monday.

What an MSP can do with digital sovereignty

What works in practice is not: overturning your whole stack. That is a digital transformation, not a quarterly project, and technology is at most a quarter of the cost. The rest is about people and processes. When IT people come out of college they know a username and password for an Azure environment and not much else. You are not going to retrain your team in one go to an open source European stack. That is neither financially nor operationally doable for a company of 40 people.

What can be done: tie the sovereignty question to the AI question. Every client wants something with AI right now. That is the moment to put two options on the table. Option one: Copilot, with which your client slides deeper into Microsoft. Option two: a sovereign variant, based on Mistral or a comparable European model for example, which you can run disconnected at the client. The email stays put. The workflow stays the same. But the new piece, which the client is going to spend money on anyway, you build on a foundation you can carry on from later.

Who will ask first and who last

There is a clear order in who puts this subject on the table and when. At the top: government bodies, large banks, insurers, hospitals. They are already working on it, partly because the Dutch central bank has said banks must be less dependent on big tech within five years. In the middle: mid-sized organisations with sensitive data or intellectual property. They say: we understand it, we want it, we are waiting for regulation and for workable alternatives. At the bottom: small business, where the question is simply whether the invoice stays affordable.

What your clients already have to deal with

Smaller municipalities now issue tenders with the EU stack question in them. For many MSPs with 10 to 20% government revenue, that is immediately relevant. In the commercial world something is changing too: clients of clients are asking questions. Anyone supplying a bank or a defence chain gets the contractual requirements passed down. There is already one public example of a large client deliberately parting with Microsoft and accepting that functionality will be lost. They say it literally: we pay more for less functionality. That is a sound that did not exist three years ago.

The strategic question for you is not whether you have to replace your whole stack now. You answer that with no. The strategic question is which European player you become a reseller for at the moment it starts to tip. A number of parties in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands are scaling up in a way that becomes visible this year. Think of Stackit from Germany, think of disconnected cloud variants running out of Luxembourg. Just as you are now a reseller of AWS or Azure, before long you can be a reseller of a European hyperscaler, without having to invest a cent in your own infrastructure. That is the path that works for an MSP of 25 to 40 people. Do not build it yourself. Do choose a position in time.

What you can do this month without turning your business upside down

Do not start with technology. Start with three client conversations at board level. Ask which data they would under no circumstances want to see in American hands. Alongside that, put two European alternatives on your radar, one for AI workloads and one for productivity, and test them internally before the first tender question arrives. The MSPs that quietly choose a position this year will be on the right side of the conversation in three years. Anyone waiting until Microsoft doubles its prices no longer chooses for themselves.