Why we moved our infrastructure away from Azure to European providers

Why we made this decision

Passguard monitors criminal marketplaces to detect infostealer infections before attackers can exploit them. Our customers trust us with sensitive threat intelligence. That comes with a responsibility to be intentional about where that data lives and who has jurisdiction over it.

Like many startups, we started on Azure. It made sense at the time: everything under one roof and generous startup credits to get going. After we announced our fundraise, we received wildly attractive offers from the big cloud providers - bonuses of tens of thousands of euros to stay or switch to their platform. But the obvious downside remained: continued dependency on US tech companies that operate under a different legal framework.

If European companies continue buying from American providers, Europe will never become truly strong and independent. Sovereignty will remain a talking point and our tech sector will continue to lag behind. We believe it is the responsibility of every European company to think about this. It certainly is ours. We wanted to go beyond hosting in European data centres of American companies. We wanted our infrastructure managed by European companies, operating under European law.

The European cloud landscape has matured

A few years ago, this move would have been difficult. The European alternatives simply weren’t there yet. That has changed. After visiting events like the Cloud Expo and speaking with a range of European providers, we found that the ecosystem has matured significantly. There are now specialised European companies that match the performance and reliability we need.

Replacing Azure is not easy. It is one of the most fundamental providers many of us use. Given our line of business and the amounts of data we process, we have high requirements: modern technology, large-scale storage, and top-tier security. We could not find a single European provider that covers all of this. Instead, we chose to work with multiple specialised providers, each excellent at what they do:

• 23M GmbH (Germany) - Cloud servers

• Impossible Cloud (Germany) - Object storage

• UpCloud (Finland) - Managed Kubernetes

• OVHcloud (France) - Cloud infrastructure

• Filen (Germany) - Encrypted storage

• bunny.net (Slovenia) - DNS

What’s not European yet

We want to be transparent: not everything runs on European services yet. We still use Google Workspace, and parts of our application layer are not yet served by European providers. For these components, there are currently no European alternatives that meet our standards. We’re keeping a close eye on the market and will make the switch when the right options become available.

Supporting the European ecosystem

This migration is about more than our own infrastructure. We believe European companies need to support each other to build a strong, independent ecosystem. The providers are there, the quality is there - what’s needed is for more companies to make the switch and invest in European alternatives.

We encourage other organisations to explore what’s available. The European cloud landscape is more mature than many people think. If you have questions about our migration or want to learn more about how Passguard protects your organisation against infostealers, feel free to reach out or start a free scan at passguard.com.