The public cloud trap
The scenario is all too familiar. You start on a hyperscaler because it is "easy". A few clicks, a credit card, and your first VMs are running. Two years later, your infrastructure depends on dozens of proprietary services: IAM, VPC, Security Groups, object storage, serverless functions. Every service adopted is another lock.
The numbers are clear: 25% of organisations have already repatriated at least one workload from the public cloud back to on-premises or colocation. The top reason? Cost (54%), followed by performance requirements (31%) and data sovereignty (27%). And for those migrating from one cloud to another, average costs reach USD 280,000 for an SME and up to USD 4.5 million for an enterprise — with 38% of projects exceeding the initial budget by more than 25%.
Then there is the CLOUD Act: any US company is required to hand over data it hosts — wherever in the world it is stored — upon request from the US government. In 2025, Microsoft admitted it cannot guarantee data sovereignty for its European customers. European governments are reacting: the EU adopted a Declaration for European Digital Sovereignty in November 2025.
What if we flipped the logic?
The dominant approach is "cloud first, sovereignty maybe later". You start by building on someone else’s foundations, and hope you can leave someday. The problem: the longer you stay, the more expensive it is to leave.
The inverse approach: sovereignty first, cloud anywhere. You start with your own infrastructure, at your premises, under your control. And you extend later — if and when you need to — to any destination, without rewriting anything.
The CloudCan box is that starting point: a complete private cloud, operational from day 1, on your premises.
CloudStack: the portable foundation
Apache CloudStack is an open source project under the Apache 2.0 licence, in production for over 15 years. It orchestrates the clouds of KDDI, Leaseweb, China Telecom, Orange and dozens of sovereign clouds worldwide.
What makes it uniquely portable:
- Native multi-hypervisor: KVM, VMware, XenServer — the same console for all.
- Extensions Framework (4.21+): orchestrators for Proxmox, Hyper-V, and Canonical MaaS (bare metal) — natively integrated.
- Extensible XaaS architecture: the framework enables integration of any external orchestrator, including hyperscalers.
- Cross-Zone Instance Restore (4.22): create a VM from a backup located in a different zone. Inter-site disaster recovery, natively.
- Cloud inception: AWS officially documented how to run CloudStack inside EC2. Your stack, portable all the way into the public cloud.
In short: one control plane, one API, one interface — regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
The CloudCan journey
The idea is not to do everything on day one. It is to start from a sovereign foundation and extend based on your actual needs.
Step 1 — Box
Your private cloud, at your premises. One physical server, CloudStack + KVM, NVMe storage. Sovereign from day 1. Your data stays in your building, under Swiss law.
Step 2 — Extend
Need additional capacity or geographic redundancy? Add a dedicated server in a Swiss datacenter. Same CloudStack, same console, same API. Both zones appear in a single interface.
Step 3 — Burst
Temporary spike? Deploy CloudStack in a public cloud for bursting. The architecture is documented, the tools exist. You do not rewrite anything — you add a zone.
Step 4 — Migrate
With Cross-Zone Instance Restore (CloudStack 4.22), move your workloads between zones. Bring them home whenever you want. Portability is not a marketing promise — it is a feature.
Same stack everywhere. Zero lock-in. Zero rewrite.
The real sovereign cloud
Many providers talk about "sovereign cloud". Most of them mean: "your data stays in our datacenter, in our country". That is a start, but it is not sovereignty — it is localisation.
Real sovereignty is control. Control of the infrastructure. Control of the code. Control of portability. The real sovereign cloud is the one you can leave.
"Start Sovereign, Extend Anywhere" — it is not a slogan. It is an architecture.
Next step
Want to see this architecture in action? Our trial programme gives you access to a complete private cloud for 30 days for CHF 500, deductible when ordering a Box.