Europe must hold its own line.

In the year 454, on a river called the Nedao, a coalition of peoples ended the rule of the Huns over Europe. The man who led them was Ardaric, king of the Gepids. He had stood at Attila’s side for years. He knew exactly how that empire worked. When the moment came, he did not ask anyone else to hold the line for him.

We named our gateway after him.

More than twelve centuries ago, a court poet called Charlemagne pater Europae, the father of Europe. Seven centuries later, Albrecht Dürer painted him for the city of Nuremberg: the German eagle over one shoulder, the French lilies over the other. Whatever else he was, he stands for an idea that has outlived every empire since: that this continent is one house, and that a house keeps its own door.

Today the door is digital. Every hospital, every utility, every administration and every company in Europe is reached through web applications. Too often, what stands in front of those applications is rented: operated somewhere else, under someone else’s law, by a company that sees every request before you do.

That was a compromise for quiet times. These are not quiet times. Attacks are now written by machines: at volume, in endless variation, at any hour. The line in front of your applications is no longer a formality. It is the last one.

We think that line has to meet three conditions.

It has to stand on your own ground. Not in someone else’s cloud: in your building, in your network, under your law.

You have to be able to read it. A defence you cannot inspect is a promise. The source of our core opens at launch.

And it has to answer to you. When it stops something, it says why, in one sentence, and you decide what happens next.

That is what we are building in Germany. Not a service you subscribe to. An instrument you own.

Europe had a father. What it needs now is a guard.

Hold the line.