CrowdStrike & STACKIT Forge EU Sovereign Cybersecurity Shield

NECKARSULM, Germany – March 05, 2026 – In a significant move to address Europe’s escalating demand for digital sovereignty, global cybersecurity leader CrowdStrike and Schwarz Digits, the technology division of the retail giant Schwarz Group, have announced a long-term strategic partnership. The collaboration will integrate the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform directly onto STACKIT, the Schwarz Group’s sovereign cloud infrastructure, creating a powerful, EU-based shield against advanced cyber threats for enterprises and public institutions.

This alliance aims to resolve a critical dilemma for European organizations: how to adopt cutting-edge, AI-driven security without compromising stringent data residency and sovereignty requirements. By making the Falcon platform available on infrastructure wholly owned and operated within the European Union, the partnership provides a direct answer to a market increasingly shaped by rigorous regulatory oversight.

The Sovereignty Mandate: A Response to Regulatory Pressure

The partnership arrives at a pivotal moment for European businesses and governments. A wave of new and updated regulations, including the EU’s Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) and the forthcoming EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), has fundamentally reshaped the continent's digital landscape. These laws are not mere guidelines; they are strict mandates that impose significant accountability on executive leadership and require organizations, especially those in critical infrastructure sectors, to demonstrate robust cybersecurity measures and data governance.

NIS2 dramatically expands the scope of entities required to implement stringent security protocols, while the CRA will soon enforce “secure-by-design” principles for all digital products sold in the EU. Combined with the foundational principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which governs the handling of all EU citizen data, these regulations create a powerful incentive for organizations to seek out solutions that guarantee their data never leaves EU jurisdiction. This regulatory framework has transformed digital sovereignty from a niche concern into a core business imperative.

“Digital sovereignty is not a theoretical concept; it is foundational to European competitiveness in the AI era,” said Rolf Schumann, Co-CEO of Schwarz Digits, in the announcement. “Bringing a premium global technology standard in cybersecurity to our sovereign stack marks an important milestone for STACKIT and the European market.” This sentiment reflects a broader European movement to regain control over its digital destiny and build strategic resilience.

Building Europe's Digital Fortress

The technical foundation of the partnership is STACKIT, Schwarz Digits' cloud platform built explicitly for data sovereignty. With all data centers located exclusively in Germany and Austria, STACKIT guarantees that customer data is processed and stored in full compliance with GDPR and other EU laws. It stands as a European-built alternative to the dominant U.S.-based hyperscalers, leveraging open-source technologies to avoid vendor lock-in and offering advanced features like confidential computing to protect data even during processing.

By deploying the Falcon platform natively within this environment, the partners ensure that all security telemetry, analysis, and threat intelligence processing occurs within the EU. This deep integration is designed to eliminate the difficult choice between top-tier security and data residency. “By integrating CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform directly into our EU-operated STACKIT infrastructure, we are helping reduce the trade-off between world-class performance and strict data residency,” noted Christian Müller, Co-CEO of Schwarz Digits.

For customers, this means access to CrowdStrike’s full suite of AI-native capabilities—spanning endpoint, cloud, identity, and exposure management—without the operational overhead or compliance risks of routing sensitive security data across international borders. The low-latency environment is expected to maintain, and potentially enhance, the speed and efficacy of the Falcon platform's real-time threat detection and response.

A Strategic Gambit in a Competitive Cloud Market

This partnership is as much a strategic business maneuver as it is a technical solution. For CrowdStrike, it represents a savvy approach to penetrating deeper into the highly regulated European market. Rather than simply promising compliance, it is embedding its technology within a trusted sovereign framework, giving it a distinct advantage in sectors like healthcare, finance, public administration, and defense.

The move also positions STACKIT to compete more effectively against sovereign offerings from global giants like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which have been launching their own EU-specific cloud regions and partnerships to meet local demand. By pairing its robust infrastructure with a best-in-class cybersecurity platform, STACKIT strengthens its value proposition as a premier sovereign cloud provider.

Underscoring the commitment, the Schwarz Group itself—a sprawling international enterprise encompassing retail brands like Lidl and Kaufland with nearly 600,000 employees—will consolidate its own cybersecurity operations onto the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. This serves as a powerful internal endorsement and a large-scale, real-world showcase of the joint solution's capabilities in a complex, high-stakes environment.

Securing the Future of AI and Innovation

Beyond compliance and defense, the partnership is being framed as an enabler of secure innovation. European organizations are eager to harness the power of artificial intelligence but are often held back by concerns over data security and regulatory ambiguity. This collaboration directly addresses that challenge.

“Every organization in Europe is asking the same question: how do we adopt AI at scale without compromising data sovereignty or security,” stated Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike. By providing a secure, sovereign environment equipped with an AI-native security platform, the partners aim to give organizations the confidence to build and deploy their own AI-driven innovations.

This forward-looking vision is already taking shape with concrete product plans. The first joint sovereign solutions to emerge from the partnership will be the Seraphic secure enterprise browser and a native, AI-based next-generation SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system. These offerings signal a long-term commitment to developing a comprehensive ecosystem of security tools that empower European organizations to not only protect their current operations but also to securely build the future.