European Technology Risk Assessment

In software architecture, we are obsessed with Single Points of Failure (SPOF). We design redundancy into our databases, we deploy across multiple Availability Zones, and we obsessively monitor our APM dashboards for the slightest tick in latency.

But in 2026, the most dangerous SPOF in your stack isn't a misconfigured Nginx server or a memory leak. It's a policy change in Washington, a naval drill in the Taiwan Strait, or a firmware update from a compromised vendor in Shenzhen.

For years, we treated the internet as a neutral utility—a flat surface where code runs the same whether you're in Berlin or Boston. That era may be coming to an end.

Here is why your threat model needs a patch.

We tend to think of the cloud as a nebulous, floating entity. In reality, it is physical hardware sitting on sovereign soil, governed by local laws.

If you are a European CTO hosting data on a US-based hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP), you might think you are safe because you selected the eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) region. But where does the control plane sit?

While your data may reside in Germany, the identity management, encryption key management, and firmware updates are often orchestrated from the US.

Where are the 13 root level DNS (Domain Name Service) servers located that are at the core of all internet services?

In the United States. And 70% of EU critical business DNS queries route through U.S. managed providers