Technological independence and data sovereignty are no longer just topics of regulatory or political debate: they have become an essential strategic requirement for companies, critical infrastructure, and public administration in Europe.

We are excited to share an important milestone in our journey: Waterstream has officially joined the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue in the strategic “Data” category.

Here is what this means for the sovereignty of your IoT data and digital assets.

What is the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue?

Promoted by the DIGITAL SME Alliance (the organization representing over 45,000 small and medium-sized digital enterprises in Europe) and developed in alignment with the EuroStack framework, the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue is Europe’s benchmark showcase for trusted, “homegrown” digital solutions.

The catalogue’s objective is clear: to map, evaluate, and promote technologies developed and controlled in Europe that offer a concrete and excellent alternative to non-EU tech giants across 5 strategic pillars: Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Connectivity, and Data Infrastructure.

To be included in the Catalogue, a technology must meet very stringent selection criteria:

• Commercial Technological Maturity (TRL 9): market-ready solutions that are already fully developed, tested at scale, and ready for deployment (moving beyond prototypes or concepts on paper).
• European Headquarters and Control: developed and operated by entities with their principal place of business and majority ownership or control within the EU or EFTA countries.
• Data Sovereignty and Jurisdiction: data processing and storage strictly managed within European borders, under exclusive European jurisdiction and regulations (GDPR and related EU standards) to ensure maximum protection and privacy.
• Interoperability and No Lock-in: open architectures designed to integrate seamlessly into multi-cloud and hybrid ecosystems.

In short, the stack maps and connects those who choose to build Europe’s digital future by focusing on resilience, security by design, and strategic autonomy.

Waterstream’s Added Value

Europe’s digital future and the competitiveness of its industrial fabric depend on the ability to manage large volumes of real-time data without yielding control of the infrastructure to non-European proprietary platforms. Traditional IoT ingestion architectures often rely on foreign, proprietary cloud message brokers, exposing European companies to vendor lock-in and cross-border data access risks.

This is precisely where Waterstream comes in as an enterprise-grade solution that bridges the gap between IoT ecosystems and enterprise event-driven architectures:

• Data Sovereignty-Native Architecture: Unlike traditional MQTT brokers or hyperscalers’ proprietary cloud services, Waterstream eliminates the need for complex multi-layer translation levels or external brokers. It is designed to operate in a completely stateless manner, leveraging Apache Kafka (or any Kafka-compatible platform) as its sole persistence layer. This means your IoT data, sessions, operational metadata, and telemetry pipelines always remain within your infrastructure, under exclusive European jurisdiction.
• Multi-cloud, On-premise, and Edge without Vendor Lock-in: Technological sovereignty requires the freedom to choose where to run your workloads. Waterstream can be deployed on-premise, in European data centers, in sovereign clouds, or across edge/hybrid environments. By ensuring native end-to-end encryption from the edge to the data center, there is no dependence on third-party components or closed cloud services, maintaining full control over your IoT data streaming pipeline.
• Industrial Scalability and Open Standards: By fully supporting MQTT 3.1 and MQTT 5.0 standards, Waterstream bridges the gap between field IoT connectivity and Kafka’s enterprise streaming ecosystem. It enables the ingestion, processing, and transmission of massive volumes of real-time IoT telemetry data with extreme efficiency, ultra-low latency, high scalability, and optimal bandwidth usage.

Our Commitment to the European Digital Ecosystem

Joining this community reaffirms the mission behind Waterstream: to empower European companies with concrete tools to build sovereign, scalable, and secure data architectures. This reduces dependency on non-EU tech stacks and ensures complete strategic autonomy throughout the data lifecycle.

Europe’s digital future depends on internal innovation, reduced foreign dependencies, and a strong, competitive ecosystem. Being part of the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue aligns with the path we chose long ago: providing an IoT data streaming platform that keeps data control in the hands of those who generate it.

Want to discover how Waterstream can support your sovereign data architecture? Whether you are designing infrastructure for smart cities, energy & utilities management, Industry 4.0, or logistics, Waterstream allows you to scale MQTT data management directly on Kafka, without data duplication or infrastructure lock-in.

Explore the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue to view Waterstream’s detailed profile and understand how our technology supports European digital autonomy.

To explore the architecture in detail or request a free trial, visit waterstream.io or consult our technical documentation.