In a cloud landscape where a few hyperscalers dominate, important conversations around data sovereignty, vendor lock-in, and true ownership are shifting from policy debates to real business opportunities. This shift opens the door for innovation and choice, especially for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) eager to find alternatives that better fit their needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leading this change is a new wave of European tech innovators championing simpler, open-source platforms that put usability, transparency, and control front and center. One standout example is mosa.cloud,<\/a> our most recent podcast guest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Catch the latest Cloudscapes episode on <\/em>YouTube<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, Apple Podcasts<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>or your favourite podcast platform.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Neils Kersic\u2019 journey to founding mosa.cloud began in the world of Google Workspace. As a long-time partner and reseller through his company Zzapps, Neils had firsthand experience of the ease and efficiency that came with Google\u2019s tools. But as conversations around data ownership, data sovereignty, and vendor lock-in intensified, so did the need for alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe started getting questions from our customers about alternatives and we didn\u2019t have a good answer. So we went out to find one!\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Neils Kersic, Founder at mosa.cloud<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That search led to the creation of mosa.cloud, a European-hosted, open-source collaboration platform designed for small and medium-sized businesses seeking simplicity, compliance, and ownership of their data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most companies don\u2019t need the \u201ceverything\u201d suite. They need a secure place to collaborate, communicate, and store documents. Yet, modern platforms continue to offer an excess of features locked behind per-user licensing models. The result? SMBs pay for tools that their employees barely touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem isn\u2019t just economic, it’s strategic. Overengineered software comes at the cost of usability, agility, and autonomy. What\u2019s needed instead is a new approach that focuses on clean, modular platforms that do less but ultimately, do it better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n mosa.cloud\u2019s design philosophy centers around the idea of content over form<\/em>. Rather than offering traditional document editors, the platform uses a markdown-native interface adapted from the French government\u2019s La Suite project. This shift strips away unnecessary formatting clutter and emphasizes real-time collaboration, clean content structures, and fast API-first workflows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why markdown? Because it’s lightweight, developer-friendly, and future-proof. With markdown, documents aren\u2019t buried in proprietary formats or dependent on a specific ecosystem. They’re portable by design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Behind mosa.cloud is a Kubernetes-based architecture that allows for composability. Don\u2019t like the calendar? Swap it. Want to extend the editor? Integrate it with AI? Automate repetitive tasks? Go ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This approach, inspired by DevOps and open-source infrastructure best practices, brings developer logic into the application layer. It allows businesses to adapt tools around their workflow, not the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a recent conversation on UpCloud\u2019s Cloudscapes<\/em> podcast, Neils Kersic, co-founder of mosa.cloud, noted:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t need a full enterprise license to let someone check their email once a week. Our whole philosophy is about giving businesses the freedom to scale only what they use.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Neils Kersic, Founder at mosa.cloud<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Digital sovereignty is often misunderstood as simply hosting data within national borders. But real sovereignty goes deeper with its principles guiding organisations to ensure that their data is and remains subject to the laws and legal jurisdiction of a certain country and is protected against direct influence and access by third-country governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A growing number of platforms claim to be \u201cEuropean\u201d but rely heavily on US-based cloud providers underneath. As Kersik puts it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf you rip the mask off and it\u2019s AWS or Google underneath, that\u2019s not sovereignty. That\u2019s branding.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Neils Kersic, Founder at mosa.cloud<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n To achieve data sovereignty, organisations need to consider the geographical location of their data and possible service providers as well as the integrity of their infrastructure, technology and operations relating to data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years we see open source becoming more and more essential to this as it guarantees visibility, portability, and the right to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike traditional SaaS platforms, mosa.cloud builds in an exit strategy from day one. Everything runs on standard, open technologies, S3-compatible storage, OIDC for identity, Docker containers, and a declarative infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This means if a customer wants to leave, they can. The promise is simple, \u201cif we\u2019re not delivering value, we don\u2019t deserve your lock-in.\u201d says Neils.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That kind of transparency is rare and it forces platforms to stay competitive on performance, usability, and support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite being the engine behind most of today\u2019s innovation, open source still struggles with alignment, funding, and consistent development. Public sector support like France\u2019s investment in La Suite Num\u00e9rique is a step in the right direction, but more is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Studies show that increasing open-source adoption by just 10% could boost the EU\u2019s GDP by 0.4 to 0.6%. That\u2019s not a fringe benefit, it\u2019s a policy imperative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Open-source collaboration platforms like mosa.cloud can play a vital role here, especially for government, education, and SMB sectors. However, they need ecosystem support from regulators, infrastructure providers, and a community of forward-thinking users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n mosa.cloud is currently preparing for its public beta release later in 2025, building on pilots across European partners and early adopters. Their roadmap includes a new email application, deeper integrations, and privacy-first AI tooling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But beyond product features, their goal is to spark a shift toward smaller, sovereign, open platforms that people actually enjoy using.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a world where complexity, surveillance, and vendor lock-in are the norm, building simple, sovereign, and open tools is nothing short of radical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83c\udfa7 Hear more from Neils Kersic on this shift toward open collaboration and European data sovereignty in Cloudscapes – available on YouTube<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, Apple Podcasts<\/a> or your favourite podcast platform.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a cloud landscape where a few hyperscalers dominate, important conversations around data sovereignty, vendor lock-in, and true ownership are shifting from policy debates to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":6806,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"52,328,235,550,271,355","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[103,88,13,94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-source","category-cloudscapes","category-data-sovereignty","category-guest-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/72"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6809,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/6809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upcloud.com\/global\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}From Google to open source: A journey rooted in change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Feature fatigue of collaboration suites<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Content over form<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Modularity, not monoliths<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What data sovereignty really means<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Portability as a promise<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why open source needs institutions (and vice versa)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s next<\/h2>\n\n\n\n