CISPE

The member list of CISPE names 55 full members, among them Anexia, Aruba, Clever Cloud, Infomaniak, Leaseweb, Outscale, Register and UpCloud. Under the articles of association, providers from outside the EU with more than 10 billion euros of global annual turnover can only join as adherent members, and AWS and Microsoft belong to this group. Trade associations such as the Dutch Cloud Community and smaller providers such as OpenNebula also take part as adherent members without a vote.

At an extraordinary general assembly in October 2026, the members turned the hyperscaler adherents into non-paying observers who no longer belong to the General Assembly. The same reform allows CISPE to defend its members in antitrust and collective redress cases, including class actions.

Claudio Abad, chief executive officer of Deda Tech, was elected president of CISPE in October 2026, with Alexander Windbichler, chief executive officer of Anexia, as vice president. Jacqueline van de Werken, group general counsel of Leaseweb, led the association as president from 2022 and is now the board secretary. Francisco Mingorance, founder of Europa Insights, is secretary general and signs for CISPE in litigation, so that board members are not personally exposed.

The articles of association place the registered office of CISPE in the Brussels Capital Region, at Avenue Louise 87 in 1050 Brussels. The members adopted the first version of these articles on 31 October 2016 and last amended them in February 2025.

In November 2022, CISPE filed a competition complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission over the licensing terms for Microsoft software in the clouds of other providers. In July 2024 the two sides settled: Microsoft agreed to develop a version of Azure Stack HCI for European hosters and to reimburse the litigation and campaign costs of CISPE, and CISPE withdrew the complaint. Under the settlement, the European Cloud Competition Observatory monitors with European customer organizations whether software vendors keep such commitments.

In March 2026 CISPE filed a second complaint, this time against Broadcom, after Broadcom had announced the end of its VMware Cloud Service Provider program in Europe. CISPE argues that price increases, bundling and minimum commitments have raised VMware costs by more than 1,000 percent.

The CISPE Cloud Sovereignty Framework certifies individual cloud services as Sovereign or Resilient after an audit by an accredited third party. A sovereign service is owned, governed and operated within the relevant jurisdiction, so that foreign powers have no legal or technical means to interfere. A resilient service keeps the customer in control through customer-managed encryption, portability, independent backups and the ability to switch providers. CISPE states that the framework matches Gaia-X Level 3, and certified services appear in a public CISPE registry.

Banks apply similar criteria when they plan a sovereign cloud and when they write the cloud exit strategy that supervisors expect for critical outsourcing.

CISPE was one of the founding members of Gaia-X, the European association that writes common rules for data and cloud services. CISPE also operates one of the nine Gaia-X Digital Clearing Houses, where participants and cloud services are checked against the compliance rules of Gaia-X.

The CISPE Summit 2026 took place in Brussels on 5 February 2026, and Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, spoke there to the cloud providers. The members decide on the course of CISPE at general assemblies, most recently at the extraordinary assembly in Ibiza in October 2026, in the tenth year of the association.