Scaleway vs Hetzner is one of the most common comparisons for teams evaluating European cloud providers in 2026. If you've been researching EU-based infrastructure, you've likely already encountered the Scaleway vs Hetzner debate — and realized that the choice is not as straightforward as pricing tables suggest.
The honest answer is that they're solving different problems. Hetzner is built for engineers who want maximum performance per euro and are comfortable managing their own stack. Scaleway is built for teams that want the managed-service depth of a hyperscaler inside a sovereign European legal framework. Getting the choice wrong means either paying for abstraction you don't need or burning senior engineering hours on infrastructure plumbing that a managed service would have handled in minutes.
At Gart Solutions, we've deployed workloads on both platforms across dozens of client engagements — FinTech, HealthTech, SaaS, and high-traffic media. This article lays out exactly what each provider does well, where each falls short, and which type of organisation should choose which.
TL;DR Summary
Choose Hetzner
If cost is the overriding constraint, you have strong DevOps capability, and you run compute-heavy workloads without needing managed services.
Choose Scaleway
If you need managed Kubernetes, AI/GPU infra, or specific EU compliance (HDS/SecNumCloud) with a developer experience closer to AWS.
100% EU-owned & exempt from US CLOUD Act (GDPR-ready)
14.3×
Hetzner Value vs AWS
4.8×
Scaleway Value vs AWS
Company overview: who is behind each platform?
Hetzner Online GmbH was founded in 1997 in Germany and remains 100% privately held. Its business model is vertically integrated: Hetzner builds and owns its own data centres, designs its own server configurations, and operates everything from the hardware up. This ownership structure is what makes its pricing so aggressive — there are no middlemen, no hyperscaler margins.
Scaleway was founded in 1999 and operates as a subsidiary of the French Iliad Group (parent company behind the Free mobile and broadband network). It has evolved from a budget VPS provider into a full-stack cloud platform with 100+ products spanning compute, storage, serverless, Kubernetes, and AI inference. Its ambition is explicit: to become the sovereign AI cloud of Europe.
Neither company has a US parent, which is the key structural fact for compliance teams. Both are outside the scope of the US CLOUD Act — meaning US authorities cannot compel either provider to hand over European customer data through a US court order.
Scaleway vs Hetzner: data sovereignty and regulatory compliance
Governance attribute
Hetzner
Scaleway
Jurisdiction
Germany (EU)
France (EU)
CLOUD Act exposure
None
None
GAIA-X participation
Non-participant
Active member
Certifications
ISO 27001, GDPR, BSI C5
ISO 27001, HDS, SecNumCloud
Management console infra
Primarily EU-hosted
Partially uses US-based services
For most organisations, both providers clear the sovereignty bar. The nuances matter at the margin. Scaleway holds HDS (French healthcare data hosting) and SecNumCloud certifications, making it the stronger choice for regulated sectors like HealthTech and FinTech operating under French or EU-specific frameworks. Hetzner holds the BSI C5 attestation — the German Federal Office for Information Security's cloud compliance standard, increasingly required for public-sector and critical infrastructure contracts in the DACH region.
One caveat worth flagging: independent analysis from 2025 noted that Scaleway's management console relies on some US-hosted infrastructure. This doesn't affect the residency of your stored data or workloads, but organisations with the most extreme sovereignty mandates should verify this against their specific requirements. Hetzner's console infrastructure is primarily EU-hosted throughout.
Navigating GDPR, HDS, or BSI C5 requirements?
Gart Solutions' compliance architecture practice helps regulated organisations map provider capabilities to specific legal frameworks — before a regulator does it for you.
Learn about our data sovereignty practice
Pricing and cost structure
This is where the comparison becomes striking. Both providers undercut US hyperscalers by a significant margin, but they do it differently.
Hetzner's model is simple: fixed monthly or hourly pricing for VMs, dedicated servers, and storage, with a generous included traffic allowance. Cloud instances ship with 20 TB to 60 TB of free monthly egress depending on the node. Overage is billed at approximately €1.18 per TB — a fraction of AWS's egress rates.
Scaleway's model offers free egress for most services, but applies bandwidth caps based on instance size. For workloads that exceed those caps, traffic is throttled rather than billed.
14.3×
Hetzner value vs AWS (compute)
4.8×
Scaleway value vs AWS (compute)
~10%
Hetzner CPX32 cost vs comparable AWS instance
In practical terms, a 300 TB monthly traffic profile that costs roughly $21,000 on AWS can be served for effectively zero on Hetzner (distributed across multiple high-traffic nodes within the free allowance), or for close to zero on Scaleway within its throttling regime. For an engineering team running cost-sensitive workloads — batch processing, media transcoding, large-scale data pipelines — the Hetzner economics are genuinely transformative.
Compute performance and infrastructure
Both providers run AMD EPYC processors as their primary x86 compute platform. Hetzner has introduced the CAX line (Ampere ARM64), offering excellent performance-per-watt for parallelisable workloads. Scaleway offers Apple Silicon on bare metal for macOS CI/CD use cases — an unusual differentiator.
In comparative testing, Hetzner instances show lower CPU variance across runs, indicating a tighter hypervisor environment with less aggressive oversubscription. Scaleway integrates instances into a more complex VPC networking stack by default, which introduces marginal overhead but provides greater architectural flexibility.
Performance metric
Hetzner CCX/CPX Winner
Scaleway PRO/PLAY
Peak sequential read
~3,728 MB/s
~2,298 MB/s
Network download speed
~1,811 Mbps
~1,673 Mbps
Performance consistency
71/100
65/100
Instance provisioning time
~25 seconds
~30 seconds
CPU architecture options
AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon, Ampere ARM
AMD EPYC, Apple Silicon (bare metal)
Scaleway vs Hetzner: Storage
Hetzner's storage portfolio covers Cloud Volumes (block), Object Storage (S3-compatible), and Storage Boxes — a distinctive multi-protocol network storage service supporting SMB, WebDAV, and SSH. Storage Boxes are particularly well-suited for centralised backup and file storage outside the standard cloud VM paradigm.
Scaleway's object storage offers three tiers: Standard, One Zone-IA, and Glacier — a deep archival tier under 100% European jurisdiction. For organisations that previously relied on AWS Glacier for cold storage, Scaleway's Glacier removes the legal exposure of a US-jurisdiction archive with no sacrifice in cost efficiency.
Storage metric
Hetzner Cloud Volumes
Scaleway Block Storage
Maximum volume size
10 TB
15 TB
Larger capacity
IOPS tiers
Standard SSD
5k or 15k
Snapshot support
Yes (manual/scheduled)
Yes (encryption-ready)
Scaling
Vertical expansion
Resize on-demand
No downtime
Scaleway's ability to resize block volumes without downtime is a meaningful operational advantage for production databases with growing datasets. Hetzner's storage is reliable but has faced criticism for longer recovery times during storage-related incidents — a product of its more centralised architecture compared to Scaleway's Multi-AZ approach.
Networking
Scaleway's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is the more mature offering, supporting full regional isolation, Multi-AZ VPC architectures, VPC Peering, and integrated IP Address Management (IPAM) — capabilities significantly enhanced in 2025.
Hetzner made significant strides with the launch of the unified Hetzner Console, which introduced the ability to provision servers without public IP addresses — important for high-security database clusters. The remaining friction is the split between Hetzner Cloud (VMs) and Hetzner Robot (dedicated servers): teams operating across both must still manage vSwitch configurations and MTU settings manually.
Bandwidth metric
Hetzner (EU regions)
Scaleway
Included traffic
20–60 TB per instance
Winner
Free (most services)
Subject to FUP
Overage cost
~€1.18/TB
N/A (throttled)
No unexpected bills
DDoS mitigation
Advanced (AI-powered)
Winner
Standard
Managed Kubernetes and container orchestration
Scaleway Kapsule is a mature managed Kubernetes service with a free control plane, native integration with Scaleway load balancers and block storage, and support for Cilium and Calico as CNI options. Scaleway Kosmos extends this to a multi-cloud Kubernetes engine — you can manage nodes from Hetzner, AWS, or bare metal from a single Scaleway control plane.
Hetzner does not offer a native managed Kubernetes service. Teams typically use community-driven tooling like kube-hetzner and hetzner-k3s, which integrate the Hetzner Cloud Controller Manager and CSI driver. These tools are production-grade, but they shift the operational burden to your team: control plane upgrades, etcd backups, certificate rotation, and node auto-healing all require explicit automation.
Kubernetes feature
Scaleway Kapsule Winner
Hetzner (DIY)
Control plane management
Managed (free)
Self-managed
Multi-cloud nodes
Yes (via Kosmos)
Native support for external nodes
Manual (Wireguard)
Auto-healing nodes
Native
Community-automated
Serverless integration
Yes
No
CNI options
Cilium, Calico
User-defined
When advising clients on Kubernetes platform selection, we at Gart Solutions weigh this trade-off carefully against team composition. A platform engineering team of 3+ can comfortably run Hetzner-based Kubernetes at significant cost savings. A 1–2 person DevOps function that also owns application deployments generally benefits more from the reduced cognitive load of a managed control plane.
Evaluating Kubernetes platform options for your team?
Gart Solutions' DevOps and platform engineering practice has implemented production Kubernetes on both Hetzner and Scaleway — we can model the right trade-off for your team size and operational model.
Learn about our platform engineering practice
Managed databases and application platform
Scaleway's managed database portfolio covers PostgreSQL (versions 12–17), MySQL 8, Redis, and MongoDB, with high availability through standby nodes and automated logical backups. In 2025, Scaleway added managed ClickHouse for analytics and a serverless SQL database that scales to zero when idle — an economical option for development environments or low-traffic APIs.
Hetzner does not offer a managed cloud database API. Databases on Hetzner are self-managed VMs — you're responsible for clustering, backups, point-in-time recovery, and version upgrades. The upside is total control and lower cost; the downside is that Day 2 database operations are entirely your problem.
Database capability
Scaleway Managed RDB Winner
Hetzner Cloud VM (DIY)
One-click cloning
Yes
Manual volume snapshot
Point-in-time recovery
Yes
Manual setup required
High availability
Standby nodes (Multi-AZ)
Automatic failover
Manual replication
Storage hot-resize
Up to 10–15 TB
On-demand expansion
Manual volume resize
Serverless SQL
Yes
Scales to zero when idle
No
AI and GPU infrastructure
The GPU landscape is where Scaleway's product strategy comes into its own. As of 2026, Scaleway operates NVIDIA H100 SXM, L40S, and L4 instances on-demand, alongside a Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) layer exposing foundation model inference via API — similar to OpenAI, but hosted under European legal jurisdiction. Its partnership with Hugging Face for sovereign inference makes it the de facto platform for European AI workloads requiring data residency guarantees.
Hetzner's GPU offering is focused on dedicated hardware: the GEX44 (RTX 4000 Ada) and GEX46 (RTX 6000 Ada) available on monthly leases. This suits long-running inference deployments or render farms where monthly lease economics beat hourly on-demand pricing. But Hetzner provides no AI software stack and no managed inference.
GPU metric
Scaleway Winner (AI)
Hetzner
Deployment model
On-demand cloud instance
Dedicated server (monthly)
H100 availability
Yes (SXM and PCIe)
Available for immediate scale
Limited / specialised
AI software stack
Native MaaS + Hugging Face
Ready-to-use inference APIs
Manual driver/stack setup
Starting price (entry GPU)
~€0.83/hr (L4)
~€0.34/hr (RTX 4000)
Sovereign inference
Yes
100% EU legal framework
Hardware-level only
Developer experience and Infrastructure as Code
Scaleway is the stronger DX platform by most measures. Its Terraform provider covers virtually every product — DNS, serverless functions, Kubernetes, object storage, managed databases — and the credential flow generates ready-to-use Terraform snippets. A developer can go from account creation to a deployed S3-compatible bucket in approximately 20 minutes.
Hetzner's DX has improved significantly with the 2025–2026 unification of the Hetzner Console, merging Storage Boxes, DNS, and cloud VMs into a single interface. The Hetzner Terraform provider is stable and fast, but narrower in scope given the smaller managed services catalogue. Hetzner's API is particularly praised for its simplicity and provisioning speed — VMs are typically available in approximately 25 seconds.
Documentation quality diverges clearly: Scaleway's documentation is closer to the hyperscaler standard, with architectural guides and detailed tutorials. Hetzner's documentation is more reference-oriented and assumes a higher baseline of systems administration knowledge.
Support, SLA, and operational risk
Reliability factor
Hetzner
Scaleway
SLA guarantee
99.9%
99.9%
Support channels
Tickets & Phone
Phone for dedicated servers
Tickets, 24/7 Phone, Slack
Winner
Standard response time
Variable (several hours)
2–4 hours
Account suspension risk
HighAggressive KYC
Moderate
Resilience model
Host failure = downtime
Multi-AZ failover
Winner
The most significant operational risk with Hetzner is its account verification process. To combat abuse at its price point, Hetzner operates an aggressive KYC and fraud detection system that has resulted in account terminations — sometimes during active migrations, with minimal explanation. For a business with a hard migration deadline, this is a real risk to plan around. Mitigation: verify your account fully before beginning any critical cutover, and maintain a warm standby on a secondary provider during the transition window.
Scaleway's primary operational risk is platform maturity: some newer managed products have experienced instability as they've grown. Standard support response times can be variable. For mission-critical workloads, Scaleway's 24/7 phone support and Multi-AZ architecture provide adequate business continuity guarantees — but thorough failover testing before go-live is recommended.
Who should choose Hetzner?
Cost-sensitive startups running stateless web applications, API servers, or batch processing at scale
High-bandwidth services (media, CDN origins, data distribution) that benefit from the 20–60 TB free egress allowance
Strong DevOps organisations comfortable managing their own Kubernetes, databases, and monitoring
Data archiving and backup use cases leveraging Storage Boxes and Object Storage
Long-running GPU compute (rendering, ML training) where a monthly dedicated lease makes economic sense
Who should choose Scaleway?
Cloud-native development teams that want managed Kubernetes, serverless, and databases without operational overhead
Regulated industries (HealthTech, FinTech, public sector) requiring HDS, SecNumCloud, or GAIA-X certification
AI and ML workloads requiring H100 on-demand or sovereign model inference under EU jurisdiction
Organisations migrating from AWS who want a familiar managed-service model inside EU legal boundaries
Small teams (1–2 DevOps engineers) where reducing the managed services footprint materially lowers operational burden
Conclusion: Scaleway vs Hetzner
The Scaleway vs Hetzner decision is ultimately a question of how much infrastructure complexity your team can absorb — and at what cost.
Hetzner is the right choice when raw compute efficiency is the primary objective and your engineering team has the skills to build and maintain the services that Hetzner deliberately doesn't offer. The economics are genuinely extraordinary and can change a company's unit economics at scale.
Scaleway is the right choice when you need managed service depth that lets developers move fast — Kubernetes without control plane overhead, databases without Day 2 operations, AI inference without building your own stack — all within a sovereign European legal framework with meaningful compliance certifications.
Both platforms represent a sophisticated, mature alternative to US hyperscalers. The "European cloud is only for budget workloads" narrative is outdated. In 2026, both Hetzner and Scaleway are capable of supporting demanding enterprise and AI workloads with legal protections and pricing transparency that AWS and GCP cannot match. Choose based on team composition and operational capability, not just the price list.
Choosing between Scaleway vs OVH in 2026 is not the same conversation it was three years ago. Both providers have matured substantially — OVHcloud now spans 46 data centres across four continents while Scaleway has doubled down on its European density and GPU-first AI platform. Meanwhile, a sharp increase in DRAM prices has forced both providers to reprice their entry-level tiers, reshaping the value calculus for budget-sensitive buyers.
If you're an engineering team, startup, SaaS company, or regulated enterprise operating under GDPR and looking for a cloud provider that keeps your data firmly inside the EU, this comparison cuts through the marketing to give you a clear, data-backed recommendation. We've drawn on independent benchmark data, provider pricing pages, and the experience of Gart Solutions' architects — who advise clients across CEE, DACH, and Benelux on exactly these decisions.
TL;DR
In the Scaleway vs OVHcloud comparison, Scaleway leads on compute value-per-euro, developer experience, and AI/GPU infrastructure under full EU isolation.
OVHcloud leads on global edge presence, regulated-industry certifications (SecNumCloud, HDS), and support for VMware/legacy migrations.
Both providers are fully immune from the US CLOUD Act — a genuine differentiator over US hyperscalers.
A 2026 RAM price surge has made entry-level VPS tiers more expensive across both providers; the value gap at mid-tier compute has narrowed.
For most EU-native SaaS teams: Scaleway. For enterprises in Finance, Healthcare, or Public Administration: OVHcloud.
46
OVHcloud data centres globally
31+
OVHcloud Local Zones
3-AZ
Scaleway regions in EEA
~2×
Scaleway value vs AWS (Callista 2026)
Company overview
OVHcloud
Founded in 1999 in Roubaix, France, OVHcloud is the largest EU-native cloud provider by revenue and infrastructure scale. As of 2026 it is publicly traded on Euronext Paris and serves 1.6 million customers across 140+ countries from 46 data centres on four continents. What makes OVHcloud unusual at its scale is vertical integration: the company designs its own server hardware, builds its own data centres, and operates its own fibre backbone. That industrial model gives it tight cost control and predictable SLAs — but also means slower iteration cycles than more software-defined providers.
Scaleway
Scaleway is a subsidiary of Iliad Group — the French telecoms holding company that also owns Free Mobile — and positions itself as the "European Public Cloud and AI Platform." Its footprint is smaller but dense within the EEA: primary regions in Paris, Amsterdam, and Warsaw, with a 2026 Milan expansion (MIL1) and a roadmap covering Sweden and Germany. Scaleway's identity is shaped by developer velocity: fast provisioning, clean APIs, transparent billing, and an increasingly serious GPU fleet underpinned by NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper hardware.
Scaleway vs OVHcloud: Pricing and cost structure
The 2026 pricing environment for both providers has been reshaped by a roughly 30% increase in RAM costs compared to late 2025, driven by global memory supply constraints. Both OVHcloud and Scaleway passed these increases on to customers — though the impact was felt most sharply in entry-level VPS tiers.
OVHcloud's April 1, 2026 pricing update moved its VPS-1 plan from roughly €3.50 to €7.60 — a near-doubling of cost — while mid-tier and bare metal instances saw more moderate increases of 10–20%. Scaleway's pricing adjustments were similarly tiered, with general-purpose instances absorbing smaller increases than memory-heavy configurations.
At mid-tier compute (four vCPUs, 8 GB RAM), Scaleway's PLAY2-MICRO and OVHcloud's VPS-2 sit at broadly comparable price points. The more meaningful differentiator is egress. Scaleway offers free egress for most services (tiered by instance size), while OVHcloud's egress model is volume-based. For SaaS teams with unpredictable traffic spikes, Scaleway's model eliminates a significant billing uncertainty.
Plan
OVHcloud
Scaleway
Entry VM (1 vCPU, 2 GB)
~€7.60 (VPS-1)
~€4.99 (PLAY2-PICO) Better value
Mid VM (4 vCPU, 8 GB)
~€14 (VPS-2)
~€14 (PLAY2-MICRO)
Managed Postgres (2 vCPU, 4 GB)
Comparable
Comparable
Object storage (1 TB)
Competitive
Competitive
Egress model
Volume-based
Free (tiered by instance) Advantage
Independent benchmarks by Callista in February 2026 found that Scaleway delivers approximately twice the value per euro of AWS, achieved by offering nearly double the single-core performance of equivalent hyperscaler instances at roughly one-quarter of the price. OVHcloud is similarly competitive against hyperscalers, though Scaleway holds a narrow edge for raw compute cost efficiency.
💰
Egress costs are often the hidden budget killer.
When we model total cloud spend for clients migrating from AWS or Azure to a European provider, egress routinely accounts for 15–25% of monthly bills.
Gart Solutions' FinOps and cloud cost optimisation practice helps teams model full-cost comparisons before committing to a provider.
Scaleway vs OVH: Infrastructure and regional availability
OVHcloud's global scale is its clearest differentiator over Scaleway. With 46 data centres and 31+ Local Zones in high-density urban areas — from Dallas to Tallinn — it is the only EU-native provider that can credibly serve latency-sensitive workloads across multiple continents from a single control plane.
Local Zones deserve a closer look. These are lightweight, modular public cloud environments that OVHcloud can deploy in weeks, often achieving sub-2ms latency for applications like live streaming and real-time retail. The limitation worth noting: Local Zones do not support OVHcloud's vRack private networking natively (requiring VPN overlays), and managed services like Kubernetes and Databases are not available there.
Scaleway's model is "European Hyperscale" — fewer total data centres, but every primary region is built with full 3-AZ redundancy from inception. Warsaw (WAW1/WAW2/WAW3) offers strong proximity for CEE and Ukrainian market traffic; Amsterdam anchors North/West European latency; the new Milan MIL1 region serves Southern Europe. For teams whose users are concentrated in the EEA, this depth is functionally equivalent to OVHcloud's broader footprint.
Region
OVHcloud
Scaleway
Paris, France
3-AZ
3-AZ
Warsaw, Poland
1-AZ
3-AZ Deeper
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Peering focus
3-AZ
Milan, Italy
3-AZ
3-AZ
North America
✅ Multiple regions
✗
Asia-Pacific
✅ Multiple regions
✗
AI and GPU infrastructure
This is arguably the most consequential comparison for 2026 buying decisions, as GPU compute has become the dominant driver of cloud infrastructure investment.
Scaleway has positioned its GPU fleet as the centrepiece of its European AI platform strategy, backed by significant capital from Iliad Group. Its current lineup includes NVIDIA Blackwell B300-SXM instances with 288 GB VRAM — the most advanced EU-native GPU offering available — alongside Hopper H100 (SXM and PCIe) for LLM fine-tuning and Ada Lovelace L40S/L4 for cost-efficient inference. The infrastructure scales to distributed training clusters of 1,000+ GPUs, providing the foundation for frontier European AI labs including Mistral AI.
OVHcloud's GPU strategy centres on bare metal access: direct hardware provisioning for researchers and enterprises who need full control over the stack. Its portfolio spans eight models including the H100, RTX 5000, and A10, with an "AI Deploy" service for pay-as-you-go notebook and inference deployment.
GPU model
OVHcloud (est.)
Scaleway (est.)
NVIDIA H100 PCIe
~€2.90/hr
~€2.99/hr
NVIDIA L40S
~€1.50/hr
~€1.45/hr
NVIDIA L4
~€0.60/hr
~€0.55/hr
NVIDIA Blackwell B300
Not available
Available EU-first
For LLM training at scale, Scaleway's Blackwell availability is a category-defining lead. For enterprise inference workloads where bare metal isolation and SecNumCloud certification coverage matter more than cutting-edge specs, OVHcloud's model is a defensible choice.
Scaleway vs OVH: Managed Kubernetes and serverless
Scaleway Kubernetes Kapsule is the choice most often recommended by our team for EU-native developers. It integrates cleanly with Scaleway's VPC, benefits from the Cockpit observability tool, and supports ARM-based node pools for cost-efficient workloads. Provisioning speed is notably fast, and the control plane is stable for production use by teams without dedicated platform engineers.
OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes has a steeper management interface but is the more battle-tested choice for high-traffic, multi-node clusters where egress performance and global backbone access matter. It's also the natural choice if your workload requires Local Zone edge deployment or tight integration with OVHcloud's bare metal and VMware Private Cloud offerings.
On serverless, Scaleway's Functions, Containers, and Jobs platform is mature and cost-efficient. A benchmark for 25 million executions at 512 MB memory / 150ms duration places Scaleway serverless at roughly €5–6/month — materially cheaper than equivalent AWS Lambda or GCP Cloud Run at that scale.
🔧
Kapsule vs OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes?
In our DevOps engagements, Kapsule consistently delivers faster time-to-production for greenfield workloads. Teams migrating existing clusters should evaluate OVHcloud if they need Local Zone placement.
Gart Solutions' DevOps and platform engineering practice designs migration paths for both directions.
Data sovereignty and compliance
Both providers are fully immune from the US CLOUD Act — the most fundamental data sovereignty requirement for EU-regulated workloads. Neither has a US parent company, which is the critical distinction that US hyperscalers cannot replicate regardless of their European infrastructure investments.
However, the compliance differentiation within the EU-native tier is real. OVHcloud holds a more extensive portfolio of high-level certifications: SecNumCloud-qualified Private Cloud (France's highest security standard), HDS for healthcare data hosting, and ISO 27001 across its core infrastructure. For organisations in Finance, Healthcare, and Public Administration facing regulatory audits, these certifications reduce compliance risk materially.
Scaleway is aligned with GAIA-X and is pursuing SecNumCloud certification across more of its product line. Its operational sovereignty is strong — approximately 90% of its hardware vendors are European — but it does not yet match OVHcloud's breadth of third-party certification.
One nuance worth flagging: OVHcloud faced a 2024 ruling by an Ontario Court of Justice compelling its Canadian subsidiary to produce data stored in European facilities. This "virtual presence" doctrine is a reminder that OVHcloud's global footprint introduces cross-jurisdictional legal vectors absent from more regionally confined providers. For organisations with absolute sovereignty requirements, Scaleway's tighter EEA perimeter reduces this risk.
Compliance metric
OVHcloud
Scaleway
CLOUD Act exposure
Zero
Zero
SecNumCloud
✅ Private Cloud Certified
In progress
HDS (Healthcare)
✅
Partial
ISO 27001
✅
✅
Global jurisdictional risk
Present (Canadian subsidiary ruling)
Lower (EEA-focused)
Compute performance and hardware
OVHcloud's 2026 compute strategy is built around its custom-manufactured Bare Metal 2026 line: servers running AMD EPYC 4005 and 9005 series processors, water-cooled for high power density. The "Game 2026" range uses AMD Ryzen 9000 X3D processors with large L3 caches for gaming and interactive workloads. At the high end, Scale and High Grade bare metal ranges offer up to 384 cores and 3 TB of DDR5 RAM — suited to virtualisation platforms, HPC, and large-scale database workloads.
Scaleway's POP2 and PRO2 instance series balance x86 and ARM (Neoverse-N1) architectures, delivering strong throughput for web and application workloads. Its Elastic Metal offering provides cloud-native bare metal with VPC integration and fast provisioning. Uniquely, Scaleway also offers Apple Silicon as-a-Service — Mac Mini M1 through M4 Pro instances for CI/CD pipelines and macOS-specific development.
On provisioning speed, benchmarks show Scaleway averaging around 30 seconds for instance creation versus OVHcloud VPS averaging approximately 800 seconds in mixed samples. For teams running ephemeral infrastructure or autoscaling events, that gap has operational consequences.
Developer experience and support
Scaleway consistently wins on developer experience. Its dashboard is clean, its CLI is fast and intuitive, and its API design follows modern REST conventions that integrate naturally with Terraform and Pulumi. The Cockpit observability tool — consolidating metrics, logs, and alerts — reduces the toolchain overhead that typically accompanies infrastructure operations.
OVHcloud's control panel has improved but remains more complex to navigate — a natural consequence of the breadth of services it covers. Its CLI is powerful and supports fine-grained Kubernetes node pool management, but has a steeper onboarding curve. For smaller teams or solo developers, Scaleway's simpler surface area is a real productivity advantage.
Support tier
OVHcloud P1 response
Scaleway P1 response
Standard
8 business hours
8 hours
Advanced/Premium
Varies
2 hours
Business
30 minutes
30 minutes
Enterprise
15 min + TAM TAM included
15 minutes
OVHcloud's Enterprise tier inclusion of a dedicated Technical Account Manager is a meaningful differentiator for large organisations that need a named point of contact for complex environments. For most engineering teams, the response time parity at Business and Enterprise tiers means support quality is not a deciding factor.
Who should choose which provider
Expert Verdict
Choose Scaleway if…
Building or scaling AI/LLM workloads requiring Blackwell or Hopper GPUs under full EU sovereignty
Your team prioritises developer velocity — clean APIs, fast provisioning, minimal operational drag
Running SaaS with variable egress and wanting predictable, transparent billing
Users are concentrated in the EEA with no APAC or North American coverage needed
Apple Silicon CI/CD or ARM-based compute at scale
SMB or startup optimising for performance-per-euro at mid-tier compute
Expert Verdict
Choose OVHcloud if…
Regulated workloads in Finance, Healthcare, or Public Administration requiring SecNumCloud or HDS certification
Migrating a VMware or Nutanix on-premise environment requiring hybrid cloud integration
Application demands global edge presence — 31+ Local Zones across four continents
Serving users in North America or Asia-Pacific with EU-native legal status
Running high-density bare metal HPC requiring up to 384 cores and 3 TB DDR5 RAM
Enterprise contracts requiring a dedicated Technical Account Manager
Conclusion
The Scaleway vs OVHcloud decision in 2026 is not primarily a question of trust or security — both providers earn that baseline with full CLOUD Act immunity and credible EU operations. The question is which architectural philosophy matches your team's trajectory.
Scaleway has evolved into Europe's most technically ambitious cloud platform for AI and developer-centric workloads. Its Blackwell GPU fleet, fast provisioning, transparent billing, and clean developer experience make it the natural home for high-velocity engineering teams and European AI labs that need sovereign compute without hyperscaler pricing.
OVHcloud has built something different and equally valuable: an industrial-grade sovereign cloud platform with a global edge network, the deepest certification portfolio in the EU-native sector, and the hybrid integration capabilities that regulated enterprises need when they can't afford to leave legacy infrastructure behind overnight.
For most teams reading this in 2026: if your workload is cloud-native and your users are in Europe, start with Scaleway. If you run regulated workloads, need global edge presence, or are migrating complex on-premise environments, evaluate OVHcloud seriously. And if you're unsure — that's precisely the conversation our architects have every week with clients across the continent.
Ultimately, the Scaleway vs OVH decision comes down to whether you prioritise developer velocity and AI infrastructure, or compliance depth and global reach.
Your engineering team is talented. But if they are spending 30–40% of their time on infrastructure maintenance — patching, monitoring, incident response, storage management — they are not doing the work that actually builds your competitive advantage. IT infrastructure outsourcing is how high-growth companies reclaim that time.
This guide gives you a realistic, technically grounded view of what outsourcing infrastructure operations actually looks like in 2026: what it costs, which models work, when it is the wrong choice, and what separates providers who deliver outcomes from those who deliver invoices. If you want to jump straight to what we do at Gart, explore our IT infrastructure management services — or use the ROI calculator below to estimate your savings before reading further.
$639B
Global IT outsourcing market in 2026 (projected)
38%
Average operational cost reduction our clients see in year one
99.97%
Average uptime delivered across Gart-managed environments
90%
of companies will face critical IT skills shortages by end of 2026
Gart Solutions
What is IT Infrastructure Outsourcing?
Imagine you’re running a marathon, but you’re also carrying your heavy backpack. That’s what managing IT infrastructure in-house often feels like for many companies. You’re trying to focus on winning the race (your business goals), but the weight of maintaining servers, networks, data centers, and security is slowing you down.
IT infrastructure outsourcing is like handing over that backpack to a professional support team running beside you. They carry it efficiently, ensuring everything inside remains organized, protected, and accessible, allowing you to focus solely on your pace and strategy.
At its core, IT infrastructure outsourcing means entrusting a specialized external provider with the management, maintenance, and optimization of your IT systems and hardware, including:
Servers and storage
Networks and connectivity
Data centers and cloud infrastructure
Security protocols and compliance requirements
Instead of managing all these internally, you leverage the expertise and resources of professionals dedicated solely to this domain.
What Falls Under IT Infrastructure?
The scope of an IT infrastructure outsourcing engagement typically covers some or all of the following:
Cloud infrastructure — multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes clusters, FinOps and cost governance, cloud-native architecture optimization
On-premises & hybrid data centers — server lifecycle management, virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V), storage (SAN/NAS/object), data center operations
Networking — LAN/WAN, SD-WAN, VPN management, firewall policy, performance monitoring, BGP/routing
Security operations — SIEM, 24/7 SOC, vulnerability management, patch compliance, penetration test coordination, compliance tooling
Backup & disaster recovery — RPO/RTO-aligned backup architecture, DR runbooks, regular failover testing
Service desk & incident management — L1/L2/L3 ticket routing, SLA-governed response times, on-call escalation paths
Why is IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Becoming Essential Today?
Today’s business landscape demands agility, security, and innovation – all while keeping costs under control. Here’s why outsourcing IT infrastructure has shifted from being a strategic option to a critical necessity:
Rapid Technological AdvancementsIT evolves so fast that in-house teams struggle to keep up with emerging tools, frameworks, and security protocols. Outsourcing partners invest heavily in continuous skill upgrades, ensuring your business benefits from the latest advancements without the learning curve.
Cybersecurity Threats Are RisingThe sophistication of cyberattacks increases daily. Outsourcing ensures your infrastructure is protected by advanced threat detection systems and experts monitoring for vulnerabilities 24/7.
Need for Scalability and FlexibilityWhether it’s Black Friday traffic spikes or sudden global expansions, businesses must scale their IT resources seamlessly. Outsourcing provides elasticity without the delays and overhead of in-house provisioning.
Pressure to Focus on Core BusinessEvery hour spent fixing servers is an hour not spent innovating or delighting customers. Outsourcing allows businesses to focus on strategic initiatives while leaving technical operations to experts.
In essence, IT infrastructure outsourcing is not about relinquishing control – it’s about gaining freedom to drive your business forward faster.
Breaking Down IT Infrastructure Outsourcing
At its simplest, IT infrastructure outsourcing is the strategic delegation of your company’s IT infrastructure management to a trusted external provider. This includes:
Hardware management: Procuring, installing, configuring, and maintaining servers, storage devices, and network hardware.
Software management: Managing operating systems, infrastructure software, and middleware.
Network management: Ensuring secure, reliable, and optimized connectivity within and beyond your organization.
Security management: Implementing and maintaining cybersecurity measures to protect systems and data.
Cloud infrastructure management: Designing, deploying, and maintaining cloud resources in platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
It’s like hiring a specialized external team to maintain, upgrade, and optimize the entire “engine room” of your business so your internal teams can steer the ship confidently towards strategic goals.
Components Included in IT Infrastructure Outsourcing
Here’s a breakdown of what infrastructure outsourcing usually covers:
Servers:Physical and virtual servers host your applications, databases, and services.
Networks:LAN, WAN, VPNs, and connectivity solutions ensure data flows securely and efficiently.
Storage Systems:Data storage solutions, backup infrastructure, and disaster recovery planning.
Data Centers:Management of on-premises data centers or leveraging third-party colocation and cloud facilities.
Security Systems:Firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, endpoint security, and compliance management.
Cloud Infrastructure:Public, private, or hybrid cloud management, including architecture design, resource provisioning, monitoring, and cost optimization.
By outsourcing these components, companies gain access to specialized expertise, advanced technologies, and robust security protocols without the overhead of building these capabilities internally.
Benefits of IT Infrastructure Outsourcing
Outsourcing IT infrastructure brings numerous benefits that contribute to business growth and success.
Manage Cloud Complexity
Over the past two years, there’s been a surge in cloud commitment, with more than 86% of companies reporting an increase in cloud initiatives.
Implementing cloud initiatives requires specialized skill sets and a fresh approach to achieve comprehensive transformation. Often, IT departments face skill gaps on the technical front, lacking experience with the specific tools employed by their chosen cloud provider.
Cloud migration and management aren’t as simple as clicking “deploy.” Each cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) has unique architectures, tools, and services requiring specialized skills and certifications.
Many organizations lack the expertise needed to develop a cloud strategy that fully harnesses the potential of leading platforms such as AWS or Microsoft Azure, utilizing their native tools and services.
For instance:
AWS requires expertise in services like EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and VPC configurations.
Azure demands proficiency in Resource Groups, Virtual Networks, Azure AD, and cost management tools.
GCP needs knowledge of Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Functions, and BigQuery integrations.
Without this expertise, companies risk:
Cost overruns due to improper provisioning
Security misconfigurations exposing critical data
Failed migrations disrupting business operations
Outsourcing to experienced infrastructure providers ensures cloud initiatives are implemented efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively.
Access to Specialized Expertise
Outsourcing IT infrastructure allows businesses to tap into the expertise of professionals who specialize in managing complex IT environments.
As a CTO, I understand the importance of having a skilled team that can handle diverse technology domains, from network management and system administration to cybersecurity and cloud computing.
Outsourcing partners bring in strategic cloud architecture design that aligns with your business goals:
Hybrid or multi-cloud setups for redundancy and compliance
Auto-scaling and elasticity to handle traffic spikes seamlessly
Disaster recovery and high availability architectures to minimize downtime risks
Cost optimization strategies like reserved instances, spot instances, and resource right-sizing
These capabilities are critical as over 86% of companies have increased their cloud initiatives in the last two years, according to Gartner, but lack in-house expertise to fully leverage them.
"Gart finished migration according to schedule, made automation for infrastructure provisioning, and set up governance for new infrastructure. They continue to support us with Azure. They are professional and have a very good technical experience"
Under NDA, Software Development Company
Enhanced Focus on Core Competencies
Outsourcing IT infrastructure liberates businesses from the burden of managing complex technical operations, allowing them to focus on their core competencies. I firmly believe that organizations thrive when they can allocate their resources towards activities that directly contribute to their strategic goals.
By entrusting the management and maintenance of IT infrastructure to a trusted partner like Gart, businesses can redirect their internal talent and expertise towards innovation, product development, and customer-centric initiatives.
For example, SoundCampaign, a company focused on their core business in the music industry, entrusted Gart with their infrastructure needs.
We upgraded the product infrastructure, ensuring that it was scalable, reliable, and aligned with industry best practices. Gart also assisted in migrating the compute operations to the cloud, leveraging its expertise to optimize performance and cost-efficiency.
One key initiative undertaken by Gart was the implementation of an automated CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline using GitHub. This automation streamlined the software development and deployment processes for SoundCampaign, reducing manual effort and improving efficiency. It allowed the SoundCampaign team to focus on their core competencies of building and enhancing their social networking platform, while Gart handled the intricacies of the infrastructure and DevOps tasks.
"They completed the project on time and within the planned budget. Switching to the new infrastructure was even more accessible and seamless than we expected."
Nadav Peleg, Founder & CEO at SoundCampaign
Cost Savings and Budget Predictability
Managing an in-house IT infrastructure can be a costly endeavor. By outsourcing, businesses can reduce expenses associated with hardware and software procurement, maintenance, upgrades, and the hiring and training of IT staff.
As an outsourcing provider, Gart has already made the necessary investments in infrastructure, tools, and skilled personnel, enabling us to provide cost-effective solutions to our clients. Moreover, outsourcing IT infrastructure allows businesses to benefit from predictable budgeting, as costs are typically agreed upon in advance through service level agreements (SLAs).
"We were amazed by their prompt turnaround and persistency in fixing things! The Gart's team were able to support all our requirements, and were able to help us recover from a serious outage."
Ivan Goh, CEO & Co-Founder at BeyondRisk
Scaling Quickly with Market Demands
Business is dynamic. Whether it’s expanding into new markets, onboarding thousands of new users overnight, or handling seasonal traffic spikes – your IT infrastructure must scale without delays or failures.
With outsourcing, companies have the flexibility to quickly adapt to these changing requirements. For example, Gart's clients have access to scalable resources that can accommodate their evolving needs.
Outsourcing partners provide:
Elastic server capacity: Add or remove resources instantly.
Flexible storage solutions: Expand databases or object storage without hardware procurement delays.
Network optimization: Enhance bandwidth and connectivity as user demands grow.
For example, Twilio scaled its COVID-19 contact tracing platform rapidly by outsourcing infrastructure to cloud providers. This automatic scaling ensured millions of people were contacted efficiently without infrastructure bottlenecks, a feat nearly impossible with only internal teams.
Whether it's expanding server capacity, optimizing network bandwidth, or adding storage, outsourcing providers can swiftly adjust the infrastructure to support business growth. This scalability and flexibility provide businesses with the agility necessary to respond to market dynamics and seize growth opportunities.
Robust Security Measures
Imagine guarding a fortress with outdated locks and untrained guards. That’s the risk many companies face managing security internally without dedicated resources.
Outsourcing IT infrastructure brings enterprise-level security expertise and tools within reach for businesses of all sizes. Here’s how:
24/7 Monitoring and Threat DetectionOutsourcing partners deploy advanced Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools, intrusion detection systems, and AI-powered threat analytics to monitor your infrastructure around the clock.
Regular Security Audits and Compliance AuditsThey conduct periodic vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and compliance checks to ensure you meet industry standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 without adding internal workload.
Data Encryption and Access ControlsProviders implement end-to-end encryption protocols for data at rest and in transit, along with strict identity and access management policies to control who accesses sensitive systems.
As the CTO of Gart, I prioritize the implementation of robust security measures, including advanced threat detection systems, data encryption, access controls, and proactive monitoring. We ensure that our clients' sensitive information remains protected from cyber threats and unauthorized access.
"The result was exactly as I expected: analysis, documentation, preferred technology stack etc. I believe these guys should grow up via expanding resources. All things I've seen were very good."
Grigoriy Legenchenko, CTO at Health-Tech Company
Piyush Tripathi About the Benefits of Outsourcing Infrastructure
Looking for answers to the question of IT infrastructure outsourcing pros and cons, we decided to seek the expert opinions on the matter. We reached out to Piyush Tripathi, who has extensive experience in infrastructure outsourcing.
Introducing the Expert
Piyush Tripathi is a highly experienced IT professional with over 10 years of industry experience. For the past ten years, he has been knee-deep in designing and maintaining database systems for significant projects. In 2020, he joined the core messaging team at Twilio and found himself at the heart of the fight against COVID-19. He played a crucial role in preparing the Twilio platform for the global vaccination program, utilizing innovative solutions to ensure scalability, compliance, and easy integration with cloud providers.
What are the potential benefits of IT infrastructure outsourcing?
High scale: I was leading Twilio COVID-19 platform to support contact tracing. This was a fairly quick announcement as the state of New York was planning to use it to help contact trace millions of people in the state and store their contact details. We needed to scale and scale fast. Doing it internally would have been very challenging, as demand could have spiked, and our response could not have been swift enough to respond. Outsourcing it to a cloud provider helped mitigate that; we opted for automatic scaling, which added resources in the infrastructure as soon as demand increased. This gave us peace of mind that even when we were sleeping, people would continue to get contacted and vaccinated.
Potential Risks of IT Infrastructure Outsourcing
While outsourcing unlocks significant benefits, it’s important to be aware of potential risks:
Risks:
Infra domain knowledge: if you outsource infra, your team could lose knowledge of setting up this kind of technology. for example, during COVID 19, I moved the contact database from local to cloud so overtime I anticipate that next teams would loose context of setting up and troubleshooting database internals since they will only use it as a consumer.
Limited direct control: since you outsource infrastructure, data, business logic and access control will reside in the provider. in rare cases, for example using this data for ML training or advertising analysis, you may not know how your data or information is being used.
Vendor Lock-in:Relying heavily on a single outsourcing provider may create challenges if switching vendors later becomes necessary. Migrating away can be complex and costly.
Compliance Risks:Data privacy regulations require careful vendor selection. Not knowing how your vendor stores, processes, or uses your data could pose legal and reputational risks, especially for sectors like healthcare and finance.
The 5 Core Benefits of IT Infrastructure Outsourcing — With Real Numbers
1. Cost Reduction That Is Measurable, Not Theoretical
The economics work because a managed provider amortizes the cost of senior expertise, monitoring tooling, and 24/7 coverage across multiple clients. A single enterprise-grade monitoring platform (Datadog, Dynatrace, or equivalent) can cost $15,000–$60,000 per month at scale — but your managed provider spreads that cost across their entire client base. For talent: a senior SRE in North America costs $180,000–$240,000 in base salary alone, before benefits, equity, and recruitment costs. Your managed infrastructure provider gives you access to that expertise without the headcount overhead. Our clients typically see 30–40% total cost of ownership reduction within 12 months.
2. Access to the Full Specialist Stack
No single hire gives you a cloud security architect, a Kubernetes platform engineer, a FinOps specialist, and a database performance engineer. Outsourcing does. This matters especially when you are navigating a complex modernization — migrating from monolith to microservices, exiting a data center, or adopting a new cloud region. Our guide on IaC tools outlines the kind of tooling depth a capable provider should bring to any modern infrastructure engagement.
3. Elastic Scalability Aligned to Your Business Cycle
Growth events create sudden infrastructure demand. A product launch, a market expansion, or an acquisition integration can require rapid provisioning capacity that a fixed in-house team simply cannot absorb without burning out or creating bottlenecks. Managed infrastructure partners scale resources in alignment with your roadmap — without the six-month hiring cycle that in-house expansion requires.
4. Reclaimed Internal Engineering Bandwidth
In most organizations, infrastructure maintenance consumes 30–50% of engineering time. That is time that could be spent on the product capabilities, data pipelines, and developer experience improvements that actually differentiate your business in market. Outsourcing operational maintenance returns that bandwidth to your team.
5. Built-In Compliance Coverage
Qualified managed infrastructure providers embed compliance tooling — automated evidence collection, audit-ready reporting, continuous security scanning — directly into their service delivery. What used to require a dedicated GRC hire or a quarterly consultant sprint becomes a continuous, always-on operational function.
Why the Business Case for IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Is Stronger Than Ever in 2026
Three forces have permanently shifted the calculus for most organizations:
The talent gap is structural, not cyclical. According to Gartner's latest IT spending forecast, worldwide IT expenditure is growing 10.8% in 2026 — reaching $6.15 trillion — yet the talent supply has not kept pace. By 2027, Gartner projects companies will spend 50% more on IT contractors than internal IT staff across most industries, as hiring senior infrastructure engineers has become structurally difficult and expensive.
The second force is infrastructure complexity sprawl. A typical mid-market company in 2026 runs workloads across two or three cloud providers, manages legacy on-premises systems in parallel, operates containerized workloads on Kubernetes, and is adopting AI/ML pipelines that require GPU clusters and specialized networking. The surface area that needs to be monitored, secured, and optimized has grown faster than any lean in-house team can realistically govern.
The third force is continuous compliance pressure. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS — the audit burden on engineering organizations is no longer a once-a-year event. It is continuous evidence collection, continuous monitoring, and continuous remediation. Organizations without a dedicated compliance infrastructure function are simply accumulating risk. You can build a picture of the current threat landscape in our guide to IT infrastructure security best practices.
Case Study
How we reduced infrastructure costs by 38% for a Series B fintech
A financial technology company with 280 employees approached Gart Solutions after their annual infrastructure bill crossed $2.4M — a 64% year-over-year increase driven by unmanaged cloud sprawl and three redundant monitoring tools their in-house team had neither the time nor the mandate to consolidate.
Over a 90-day transition and a six-month optimization phase, Gart assumed full managed operations of their multi-cloud environment (AWS primary, Azure DR), consolidated observability tooling onto a single OpenTelemetry-based stack, right-sized 140+ EC2 instances, implemented IaC governance via Terraform, and established SOC 2 Type II-aligned security monitoring.
38%
Reduction in annual operating costs
100%
DevOps time redirected to product
IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Models: Which One Is Right for You?
One of the most common mistakes companies make is choosing the wrong engagement model — then blaming outsourcing itself when the results disappoint. Here is a clear-eyed breakdown:
ModelWho Owns OperationsBest ForTypical Cost StructureControl LevelFully Managed ServicesProvider end-to-endLean IT teams; companies scaling fast; orgs without mature in-house opsMonthly flat fee or per-device/workloadMedium — outcomes defined by youCo-Managed (Hybrid)Shared — provider handles defined layers, client retains othersMid-market firms with existing IT staff who need specialized depth in specific domainsTiered subscription + domain-specific feesHigh — shared accountability modelStaff AugmentationClient manages — provider supplies engineersOrgs with defined processes needing headcount, not a managed serviceMonthly retainer per engineerFull — client directs all workProject-Based OutsourcingProvider during project; client post-deliveryOne-time transformation initiatives (cloud migration, DC exit, DR build)Fixed-price or T&MHigh — outcome-scoped engagementOutcome-Based ContractProvider — paid on delivered KPIsMature buyers seeking strategic partnership with financial accountabilityBase fee + SLA performance bonuses/penaltiesMedium — results-driven governanceIT Infrastructure Outsourcing Models: Which One Is Right for You?
The co-managed model has become the dominant choice for companies in the $30M–$500M revenue range. It preserves your team's strategic control while offloading the operational layer. For guidance on how consulting fits into your infrastructure strategy, see our IT infrastructure consulting services overview.
In-House vs. IT Infrastructure Outsourcing: A Direct Decision Framework
FactorIn-House TeamIT Infrastructure OutsourcingTotal Cost of OwnershipHigh — salary + benefits + tooling licenses + PTO + attrition replacement (often 1.5–2× base)Predictable monthly fee; tooling typically included; no hiring overhead24/7 CoverageDifficult without 6–8+ engineers; on-call rotation burns out small teams24/7/365 NOC and SOC coverage included in managed serviceExpertise BreadthLimited by hiring budget; skill gaps are common and expensive to fillFull specialist stack: cloud, security, networking, DB, FinOps — on-demandScalability Speed3–6 month hiring cycles for senior roles; slower than business demandElastic — capacity adjusted with days or weeks of noticeTooling & LicensingFull cost borne by the organization; often duplicated across teamsShared across provider's client base; enterprise rates; typically includedCompliance & AuditRequires dedicated internal resource or expensive consultant engagementsEmbedded in service delivery with automated evidence collectionArchitecture ControlFull ownership of design and roadmapRetained at architecture level; execution delegatedKey-Person RiskHigh — losing one senior engineer can destabilize operationsLow — provider manages bench, continuity, and knowledge transferIn-House vs. IT Infrastructure Outsourcing: A Direct Decision Framework
When IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Is the Wrong Choice
Outsourcing is not the right answer for every organization. Here are the situations where keeping operations in-house — or taking a more limited co-managed approach — is the better call:
Your infrastructure is your product.If your core business is the infrastructure itself (you are a cloud provider, a CDN, a hardware company), operational knowledge is too central to your competitive advantage to delegate. You need to own it.
You cannot yet describe what "good" looks like.Outsourcing before you have defined SLAs, runbooks, and success metrics means handing over control without accountability. You will not be able to evaluate whether the provider is doing a good job — and neither will they.
Your environment is undocumented and high-risk.A provider cannot safely take over what has not been documented. If your infrastructure has no runbooks, no architecture diagrams, and no incident history, you need a discovery and documentation phase first — often best done internally or through a consulting engagement rather than a managed services handover.
You are at pre-product stage.Early-stage startups with small, experimental infrastructure and a CTO who wants to stay close to the stack are generally better served by a cloud-native, self-service approach (AWS managed services, GCP managed databases, etc.) than by a full managed services engagement.
What a Modern IT Infrastructure Outsourcing Stack Looks Like in 2026
A credible managed infrastructure provider should be able to demonstrate working knowledge — not just vendor logos — across the core tooling categories that define modern infrastructure operations. At Gart, our delivery stack includes:
Expertise across the modern stack
Cloud & Compute
AWS (EKS, ECS, EC2, RDS, S3)
Azure (AKS, Virtual Machines, Azure SQL)
Google Cloud Platform
Kubernetes (on-prem & managed)
VMware vSphere / Hyper-V
Infrastructure as Code & Automation
Terraform & Terragrunt
Ansible
Pulumi
GitLab CI / GitHub Actions
ArgoCD / Flux (GitOps)
Observability & Security
Prometheus + Grafana
OpenTelemetry
Datadog / Dynatrace
Elastic SIEM
Wazuh / Falco
Vault (secrets management)
For a detailed breakdown of the IaC tooling landscape, see our comparison of top Infrastructure as Code tools. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's annual survey, Kubernetes adoption has reached 96% among enterprises — which means operational complexity has too. Providers who cannot demonstrate deep Kubernetes expertise are behind the curve.
The Process for Outsourcing IT Infrastructure
Gart aims to deliver a tailored and efficient outsourcing solution for the client's IT infrastructure needs. The process encompasses thorough analysis, strategic planning, implementation, and ongoing support, all aimed at optimizing the client's IT operations and driving their business success.
Free Consultation
Project Technical Audit
Realizing Project Targets
Implementation
Documentation Updates & Reports
Maintenance & Tech Support
The process begins with a free consultation where Gart engages with the client to understand their specific IT infrastructure requirements, challenges, and goals. This initial discussion helps establish a foundation for collaboration and allows Gart to gather essential information for the project.
Then Gart conducts a comprehensive project technical audit. This involves a detailed analysis of the client's existing IT infrastructure, systems, and processes. The audit helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, providing valuable insights to tailor the outsourcing solution.
Based on the consultation and technical audit, we here at Gart work closely with the client to define clear project targets. This includes establishing specific objectives, timelines, and deliverables that align with the client's business objectives and IT requirements.
The implementation phase involves deploying the necessary resources, tools, and technologies to execute the outsourcing solution effectively. Our experienced professionals manage the transition process, ensuring a seamless integration of the outsourced IT infrastructure into the client's operations.
Throughout the outsourcing process, Gart maintains comprehensive documentation to track progress, changes, and updates. Regular reports are generated and shared with the client, providing insights into project milestones, performance metrics, and any relevant recommendations. This transparent approach allows for effective communication and ensures that the project stays on track.
Gart provides ongoing maintenance and technical support to ensure the smooth operation of the outsourced IT infrastructure. This includes proactive monitoring, troubleshooting, and regular maintenance activities. In case of any issues or concerns, Gart's dedicated support team is available to provide timely assistance and resolve technical challenges.
Evaluating the Outsourcing Vendor: Ensuring Reliability and Compatibility
When evaluating an outsourcing vendor, it is important to conduct thorough research to ensure their reliability and suitability for your IT infrastructure outsourcing needs. Here are some steps to follow during the vendor checkup process:
Google Search
Begin by conducting a Google search of the outsourcing vendor's name. Explore their website, social media profiles, and any relevant online presence. A well-established outsourcing vendor should have a professional website that showcases their services, expertise, and client testimonials.
Industry Platforms and Directories
Check reputable industry platforms and directories such as Clutch and GoodFirms. These platforms provide verified reviews and ratings from clients who have worked with the outsourcing vendor. Assess their overall rating, read client reviews, and evaluate their performance based on past projects.
Read more: Gart Solutions Achieves Dual Distinction as a Clutch Champion and Global Winner
Freelance Platforms
If the vendor operates on freelance platforms like Upwork, review their profile and client feedback. Assess their ratings, completion rates, and feedback from previous clients. This can provide insights into their professionalism, technical expertise, and adherence to deadlines.
Online Presence
Explore the vendor's presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Assess their activity, engagement, and the quality of content they share. A strong online presence indicates their commitment to transparency and communication.
Industry Certifications and Partnerships
Check if the vendor holds any relevant industry certifications, partnerships, or affiliations.
Technical Expertise:Review their team’s skills across infrastructure domains – servers, networks, cloud, security, and automation.
Cultural Fit and Communication:Effective communication ensures smooth collaboration. Assess their language proficiency, time zone overlap, and responsiveness during initial consultations.
Scalability and Flexibility:Check if they can scale resources quickly to match your evolving business needs.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs):Evaluate guarantees on uptime, issue resolution times, data security, and exit processes.
By following these steps, you can gather comprehensive information about the outsourcing vendor's reputation, credibility, and capabilities. It is important to perform due diligence to ensure that the vendor aligns with your business objectives, possesses the necessary expertise, and can be relied upon to successfully manage your IT infrastructure outsourcing requirements.
Why Ukraine is an Attractive Outsourcing Destination for IT Infrastructure
Ukraine has emerged as a prominent player in the global IT industry. With a thriving technology sector, it has become a preferred destination for outsourcing IT infrastructure needs.
Ukraine is renowned for its vast pool of highly skilled IT professionals. The country produces a significant number of IT graduates each year, equipped with strong technical expertise and a solid educational background. Ukrainian developers and engineers are well-versed in various technologies, making them capable of handling complex IT infrastructure projects with ease.
One of the major advantages of outsourcing IT infrastructure to Ukraine is the cost-effectiveness it offers. Compared to Western European and North American countries, the cost of IT services in Ukraine is significantly lower while maintaining high quality. This cost advantage enables businesses to optimize their IT budgets and allocate resources to other critical areas.
English proficiency is widespread among Ukrainian IT professionals, making communication and collaboration seamless for international clients. This proficiency eliminates language barriers and ensures effective knowledge transfer and project management. Additionally, Ukraine shares cultural compatibility with Western countries, enabling smoother integration and understanding of business practices.
The Gart 5-Step Infrastructure Optimization Model
Every Gart managed infrastructure engagement follows the same structured delivery model — designed to eliminate the instability that plagues most outsourcing transitions and to move from reactive management to proactive optimization as fast as possible.
Discovery & Current State Assessment
We conduct a full technical inventory of your environment: cloud accounts, compute and storage footprint, network topology, security posture, observability coverage, runbook completeness, and open incident backlog. This produces a CSA document that becomes the baseline for SLA definitions and optimization targets. Duration: 2–4 weeks.
Shadow Operations & Knowledge Transfer
Before assuming responsibility, our team shadows your current operations — monitoring alongside your team, documenting tribal knowledge, and running fire drills for the most common incident types. This eliminates blind spots and ensures continuity. Duration: 2–4 weeks (overlapping with discovery).
Controlled Handover & Stabilization
Operational responsibility transfers domain by domain — not all at once. We start with monitoring and alerting, then incident response, then change management. Each domain is handed over only after documented runbooks are in place and the shadow period has been completed. Duration: 4–8 weeks.
Baseline Optimization
Once in steady-state, we conduct a structured optimization pass: right-sizing compute resources, consolidating overlapping tooling, implementing or improving IaC coverage, and establishing automated compliance reporting. This is where the majority of cost savings are realized. Duration: months 3–6.
Continuous Improvement & Strategic Partnership
From month 6 onward, the engagement shifts to continuous improvement: quarterly architecture reviews, proactive capacity planning, FinOps governance, and contribution to your engineering roadmap. Monthly business reviews track KPIs against baseline. This is the phase where the real strategic value of outsourcing is realized.
Our managed IT infrastructure services are structured around this model for every engagement. If you want to understand how this maps to your specific environment, request a free infrastructure cost audit - we typically turn these around in 48 hours.
Long Story Short
IT infrastructure outsourcing empowers organizations to streamline their IT operations, reduce costs, enhance performance, and leverage external expertise, allowing them to focus on their core competencies and achieve their strategic goals.
By delegating complex infrastructure management to specialized providers, businesses can:
Access advanced expertise and technologies
Scale flexibly with market demands
Strengthen cybersecurity and compliance
Focus internal teams on strategic innovation
Optimize costs with predictable budgets
In a world where digital resilience defines market leadership, outsourcing IT infrastructure is your ticket to agility, efficiency, and sustainable success.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your IT infrastructure through outsourcing? Reach out to us and let's embark on a transformative journey together!
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