EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: FR

YS::Desktop: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

YS::Desktop is a type 1 hypervisor for workstations from the French company Kerys Software. It runs several isolated environments, called security domains, each with one or more virtual machines, side by side on a single physical PC. It is aimed at privileged-access workstations, regulated or sensitive environments, development environments and IT/OT convergence zones. According to the vendor it separates the CPU cores of the hypervisor and the VMs and encrypts at hypervisor level. Administrators manage policy through a central management console that the customer deploys itself. YS::Desktop is installed as the first operating system on the workstation, via PXE, HTTP boot or a USB key.

Kerys Software SAS is based in Palaiseau, France; its legal notice names no parent company. The management console runs wherever the customer chooses; according to the vendor, Kerys has no visibility into the console or its configurations. Control over workstations and policy therefore stays with the organisation. For a European organisation this is self-hosted software from a French vendor, with no vendor cloud environment required.

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Sovereignty score
80 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-380
    Closed source, but self-hostable: encryption keys and runtime under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-640
    Closed source: switching requires data migration
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-680
    Closed source, but self-hostable on your own infrastructure

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 15, 2026
Headquarters
FR (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
Self-hosted, e.g. in EU (your choice)Verified by hand
Open-source
NoVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
NoVendor-stated
Category
Virtualisation & Containers
Type
Product
Website
kerys.software ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to YS::Desktop

The European alternatives to YS::Desktop come from our knowledge base of over 9,400 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

27 European Virtualisation & Containers vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with YS::Desktop

YS::Desktop is headquartered in FR and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

YS::Desktop runs on infrastructure you choose and control yourself. You decide where the data lives, including fully within the EU if you want — this is not a fixed hosting choice made by the vendor.

YS::Desktop is closed source, but you run the software yourself on your own infrastructure. The encryption keys and the runtime therefore stay under your own control, though you cannot audit or modify the source code. Ask about export options and open standards to limit software-level lock-in.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs YS::Desktop together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to YS::Desktop?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to YS::Desktop include APPUiO (VSHN), Capsule and Gardener. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to YS::Desktop?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to YS::Desktop include Capsule, Gardener, Giant Swarm, Harvester, IncludeOS, K3s and Kamaji. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is YS::Desktop GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

YS::Desktop is headquartered in FR (EU) and hosts data in EU. That makes YS::Desktop an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 15, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

We found none of these signals on the vendor's own site when we checked.

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 15, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

Digital sovereignty in Virtualisation & Containers

Virtualisation & Containers: Virtualisation platforms, container management, Kubernetes distributions and hypervisors. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to YS::Desktop — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score