Building Europe’s Digital Sovereignty Through Cloud-Edge Innovation

On December 4, Maurizio Griva, Associate Partner at Adeptic Reply, delivered a technical webinar focused on a strategic priority for Europe’s technological future: digital sovereignty. The session provided an overview of IPCEI-CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest – Cloud Infrastructure and Services), a major European initiative aimed at developing the cloud-edge continuum. Reply contributes to the program as both a direct partner and a coordinator of a wider industrial ecosystem.

He defined digital sovereignty as the ability of states, organizations and citizens to retain control over data, infrastructure and critical technologies—reducing dependency on non-European providers while supporting compliance with EU requirements. In this context, Europe still faces gaps compared to global cloud leaders, limited interoperability across platforms, and increasing exposure to vendor lock-in risks, reinforcing the need for open and sustainable solutions. A core topic of the webinar was the cloud-edge continuum, a distributed architecture that allocates computing and service capabilities between large cloud platforms and edge nodes closer to users or data sources. This model is essential for advanced use cases such as industrial IoT, autonomous robotics, next-generation telco networks, and real-time services, and represents a key lever to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness while mitigating critical dependencies.

Maurizio then presented Reply’s work within the 8RA initiative of IPCEI-CIS, which aims to build a resilient, federated and open European platform for next-generation cloud-edge services. Reply is one of 19 direct partners and leads key activities, including:

• Developing an end-to-end telco-cloud orchestrator to manage distributed resources across multiple domains.
• Creating the Autonomous Robotic Framework, integrating robotic and sensor systems with intelligent edge platforms.
• Contributing to NeoNephos, an open-source repository backed by the Linux Foundation, dedicated to digital-sovereignty architectures and components.

The webinar highlighted concrete solutions such as the multi-domain orchestrator and the autonomous robotics platform, both designed for deployment across federated cloud-edge infrastructures.

The session concluded that Europe’s digital services will increasingly rely on Network-as-a-Service models, disaggregated networks, and multi-vendor federations, with the cloud-edge continuum emerging as a foundational capability for telco operators and system integrators supporting Europe’s long-term digital sovereignty.