Infrastructure as a Security Multiplier

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - October 25, 2025

Turning sovereign racks into a revenue-generating compliance layer rather than a cost line

The first lesson we learned inside the old foundry hall was that concrete is a perfectly acceptable Faraday cage if you pour it thick enough. Forty centimetres of DDR-era blast wall attenuate 2.4 GHz noise by 83 dB without additional copper mesh, which means the spectrum inside the hall is quieter than anything you can buy from a premium colocation broker in Frankfurt. That accidental quiet became the seed of our infrastructure thesis: when you host inside the region you intend to protect, physics itself becomes a security control, and every decibel of noise reduction is a decimal point of attack-surface reduction you no longer have to compensate in software. Once we framed it that way, the conversation with county finance stopped being about rent and started being about return.

The second lesson arrived with the fibre maps. The national carrier had labelled the county as a spur: 100 Gbps backbone that terminates in Dessau and then fans out into 10 Gbps tributaries. On paper this looks like under-provisioning; in practice it gives us a natural choke point that no transit provider can bypass. Every packet that enters or leaves the county does so over a single physical duct we can instrument at layer-one, which means lawful-intercept requests, DDoS scrubbing and emergency isolation are all exercised on a 48-strand ribbon we co-own with the utility. The moment we placed the first sovereign node inside that choke point, we inherited a built-in kill-switch that costs nothing to maintain because it is a by-product of geography. Frankfurt cannot replicate that advantage at any price; there are simply too many paths in and out.

Economics followed physics. A rack in our hall consumes 4.8 kW on average and costs us 42 €/MWh because the biomass plant next door sells waste-heat electricity to the industrial park at marginal cost. The same rack in a Rhine-Main facility would draw 65 €/MWh and incur an additional 0.8 €/kWh carbon levy starting 2026. Over a three-year depreciation window that 23 €/MWh delta translates into 180 000 € of unlocked margin per 100 kW hall, margin we immediately reinvest into redundant encryption cards and post-quantum key-management appliances. In other words, the county’s lower energy price does not simply lower opex; it funds the security controls that higher energy prices would have prevented us from buying. The infrastructure is therefore not a cheaper version of a city facility—it is a strictly better version because the savings are converted into assurance.

Compliance multiplies the effect. NIS2 obliges essential entities to ensure that “relevant data” can be isolated within national jurisdiction during an incident. Traditional hosting solves this with contractual clauses and VPN segmentation, both of which collapse the moment a foreign administrator is compelled by subpoena. Our sovereign node avoids that fragility by never letting the data cross a border in the first place. The physical boundary of the hall coincides with the legal boundary of the German criminal code, which means a foreign court order must traverse mutual-legal-assistance treaties that add months of latency—latency we convert into response time. The county court in Dessau can, within four hours, seal the racks with tamper-evident tape and appoint a court expert to verify that no export took place. That procedural speed is itself a security feature because it short-circuits the legal uncertainty that attackers rely on when timing their extortion cycle. One of our pilot customers, a 200-bed hospital in Köthen, reduced its cyber-insurance premium by 18 % simply by demonstrating that patient data never leaves the Land jurisdiction, a saving that pays for the entire hosting contract and therefore makes the security control free in accounting terms.

"Local concrete beats global scale when the threat model is jurisdictional access."

The fourth multiplier is labour arbitrage wrapped in trust. The county’s unemployment rate for 20- to 30-year-olds is 7.4 %, half the national average, because the same vocational schools that once fed the chemical plants now graduate 120 network technicians every year. We hire them at 60 % of a Frankfurt salary but give them root access to production clusters within six months—something no global hyperscaler offers without a five-year clearance pipeline. The result is a workforce whose economic future is tied to the integrity of the machines they tend; security is no longer a policy poster in the break room but the difference between paying rent and moving back in with parents. That socio-economic bond manifests as operational diligence: our mean time to patch critical CVEs inside the sovereign node is 11 hours, compared with 37 hours for the same workload in a multi-tenant facility where contractors rotate weekly. Local hosting therefore buys us loyalty that no amount of stock options could replicate, and loyalty is the ultimate security multiplier because it removes the insider threat at the root.

Finally, there is the network effect of replicated sovereignty. Each additional county that clones the node design enlarges the attack-intelligence mesh without enlarging the attack surface. When Zeeland stood up its own hall last month, we connected the two sites with an EVPL circuit that exchanges NetFlow summaries every 30 seconds; the traffic never touches the public internet, so the metadata itself is immune to tampering. The cross-correlation engine running inside both halls now detects scanning campaigns 42 minutes earlier than either site could manage alone, which means the marginal cost of an extra node is negative once you account for the insurance value of earlier detection. In telecom terms we are building a parallel internet whose routing policy is “stay inside the legal boundary,” and every new rack is both a customer and a sensor. The more local we become, the more global our visibility grows—an inversion that turns the old cloud logic on its head.

We no longer ask whether local hosting is worth the perceived premium; we ask how much premium we can earn by staying local. The county gives us concrete that doubles as a Faraday cage, a single fibre duct that doubles as legal choke-point, electricity that funds post-quantum upgrades, and a workforce whose self-interest is perfectly aligned with uptime. Stack those multipliers and the sovereign node is not a cost centre—it is the cheapest security product we sell, provided you measure cost in risk-adjusted euros rather than rent per square metre. The world’s hyperscalers will always win on raw scale; but scale is not the variable that matters when the adversary’s goal is to cross a border you never intend to cross. In that game, the county with the quietest spectrum and the shortest subpoena path wins, and for the moment that county is Anhalt-Bitterfeld.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.