European digital sovereignty is often framed as a binary choice between domestic technology and US platforms. Schwarz Group's 2024 agreement with Google proposed a more pragmatic architecture.
Google would provide the productivity layer while STACKIT and Schwarz security capabilities would keep key data-control functions inside a European environment.
The partnership used Schwarz itself as the anchor customer
Moving roughly 575,000 employees onto Google Workspace gave the joint proposition an unusually large internal deployment.
That scale could validate integration, encryption and operational processes before Schwarz tried to sell the model more widely.
Sovereignty was decomposed into layers
The agreement implicitly accepted that application innovation and infrastructure control can come from different providers. Customers may care more about where keys, data and administrative authority sit than about the nationality of every line of software.
This layered model could be more commercially viable than recreating entire productivity suites from scratch.
The tension is strategic dependence
Even with local storage and encryption, customers remain exposed to a US vendor for core software functionality and product direction.
The Schwarz-Google architecture is therefore best understood as risk reduction rather than technological independence. Its significance lies in making that trade-off explicit and operational.