From 12 January 2027, Article 25 of the EU Data Act bans switching fees between cloud providers. It follows the European Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework and the Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty. Together, they turn a question most European operators have quietly avoided into a decision with a deadline attached.
Here’s why that deadline is less alarming than it sounds: meeting it no longer has to cost what it used to. Scalstrm cuts total cost of ownership by half and power consumption by 80% against a conventional deployment, and moving to a sovereign or hybrid setup is fast, not a rebuild. First, a look at where most operators are stuck today.
Most operators have already picked one of three ways to handle this, whether they’ve named it that way or not, and each one runs into the same wall eventually.
The first is to wait for the rules to settle.
It feels safest, since the regulation is still moving and procurement criteria vary by market. But waiting doesn’t buy time, it spends it. Deciding to go sovereign takes a single meeting; rebuilding a live workflow to match it takes considerably longer, and the notice period rarely matches the runway needed.
The second is to buy an EU region and call it sovereignty.
It’s quick, it can be done from a console in an afternoon, and it solves the wrong problem. Residency controls where data sits, not who can legally compel access to it. A provider headquartered outside the EU can still be reached regardless of where its servers are, and that gap usually stays invisible until a tender asks the harder question.
The third is to pay the sovereign premium outright.
It’s the honest option, and the one that dies in budget review most often. Sovereign facilities run at smaller scale than hyperscale clouds, so every rack costs more, and compliance has to out-argue commissioning, marketing and rights acquisition for budget, a fight it usually loses.
Scalstrm changes that arithmetic directly.
Paired with NETINT video processing units, our platform transcodes and packages 110 broadcast-grade HD channels in a single rack unit, at half the total cost of ownership and 80% less power than a conventional deployment. That’s not a marginal saving stacked on top of the sovereign premium. It’s what removes the premium.
That single change answers all three problems at once. It removes the budget objection that kills sovereign proposals, because a halved cost base still lands below what the workload costs today, even at a higher unit price. It removes the need for the region-only shortcut, because sovereignty at that footprint fits into a national facility, a regional site, or an existing equipment room, none of which could take several racks. And it makes waiting survivable, because an architecture already this portable doesn’t need months of restructuring once the requirement lands. The deadline stops being a threat and becomes a date on the calendar.
None of this requires a migration project. Scalstrm runs as one platform everywhere, on-prem, in any public cloud, or split across both, so a workload that moves is redeployed rather than rebuilt. That flexibility holds wherever you run it. What doesn’t travel with it to a standard cloud CPU is the extreme efficiency: the halved TCO, the 80% power cut, and the single-rack density come specifically from pairing our software with NETINT VPUs. Run Scalstrm on standard cloud infrastructure and you keep the freedom to move anywhere. You don’t keep those numbers.
IBC2026: Meet Scalstrm
Stand 5.G56 will show what that looks like in practice: all 110 HD channels running on a single server, on-prem, in the cloud, or hybrid, built for EU sovereignty requirements. Amsterdam, 11 to 14 September.
Book a meeting with us: https://calendly.com/d/dz6q-98v-nvs
