Whose law applies to your data?

Sovereign cloud

Every cloud is somewhere, owned by someone, answerable to some jurisdiction. Ours is in Stavanger, owned by us, answerable to Norwegian law. This page says exactly what that means, and what it does not.

What sovereign means

Three questions decide it, and none of them is marketing

Sovereign is a property you can check, not a badge: where the data physically sits, who operates the machines it sits on, and which country's law can compel access to it. For the platform we host, the answers are Stavanger, us, and Norway.

Inside Norwegian jurisdiction Your operations The platform Stavanger, Norway Anywhere else Crossing is a choice
Inside Norwegian jurisdiction Your operations The platform Stavanger, Norway Anywhere else
Nothing in the architecture requires data to cross the border. When something should, that is your decision, not a default.

Where it sits

On hardware we own in Stavanger: more than 50 servers, 2 PB of disk, 400 TB of SSD. Not leased capacity in someone else's region, machines we bought, racked and run ourselves.

Who operates it

An all-Norwegian engineering team that controls the stack end to end, from the filesystem to the API. The people with root access are the people who built the platform, and every one of them is under Norwegian jurisdiction.

Which law applies

Disclosure laws follow the provider, not the disk. IntelliStream is a Norwegian company on Norwegian soil, so access to your data is a question for Norwegian and EEA law, wherever the request comes from.

No lock-in

Sovereign, not stranded

A sovereign cloud you cannot leave is just a smaller cage. The platform is open source under AGPL-3.0 and cloud-agnostic: run it on our metal in Stavanger, in your own data center, in whatever cloud you already use, or entirely without internet access. The code is public, so the exit is a repository clone, and that is deliberate.

One platform Our metal Stavanger, Norway Your data center air-gapped if you like Your cloud any provider
One platform Our metal Stavanger, Norway Your data center air-gapped if you like Your cloud any provider
Same code, same model, wherever it runs. The sovereignty level is your pick, not your constraint.

Sovereignty includes the freedom to leave, including from us.

The hardware

The promise is physical, and you can visit it

Sovereignty talk is cheap until there are serial numbers behind it. The hosted platform runs on more than 50 servers with 30 TB of RAM, 2 PB of disk and 400 TB of SSD, connected with InfiniBand and NVMe-oF over RDMA, with ZFS keeping the checksums honest, orchestrated by software we wrote and can debug ourselves. The technical picture covers the whole stack, store by store.

Our own metal, in Stavanger, operated by the people who built the platform.

As we grow

Stavanger today, closer to you tomorrow

We are a startup, and we say so plainly. As we grow, we will hire and train more engineers, and open offices and data centers near our biggest markets, so the people and the machines that carry your data sit close to the operations they serve. For the customers that need it, that can mean building near you. Your trust means everything to us, and it decides where the next office and the next rack go.

Common questions

Asked and answered

What is a sovereign cloud?

A cloud where you can answer three questions with certainty: where the data physically sits, who operates the infrastructure, and which country's law governs access to it. If any answer is "it depends", it is not sovereign, whatever the brochure says.

Does our data leave Norway?

Not through us. The hosted platform runs on hardware we own in Stavanger, operated by our own team, and nothing in the architecture requires data to cross the border. Connections to external services are yours to make, and yours to not make.

Can we run it without any cloud at all?

Yes. The platform is open source under AGPL-3.0 and cloud-agnostic: your data center, your cloud account, or fully air-gapped with no internet access. Self-hosting is the strongest form of sovereignty, and it is a first-class deployment, not a special build.

What does a foreign cloud act mean for data stored in Europe?

Disclosure laws follow the provider, not the disk: a provider answerable to a foreign jurisdiction can be ordered to hand over data it controls, wherever that data is stored. The way around that is structural: a provider that answers to your jurisdiction, or no provider at all. We offer both.

Ask us where your data would actually be

Street address, rack, jurisdiction, exit plan. If sovereignty matters to you, those answers should be boring and specific, and ours are.