Reference

A plain-language glossary.

The IT, Odoo and compliance terms we use, explained without jargon. If something here is unclear, ask us — clear language is part of the job.

Managed services: Ongoing administration of your IT — cloud, servers, email, security and updates — handled proactively for a predictable fee, instead of calling someone only when something breaks.
Odoo: An open-source business-management suite (ERP) covering sales, inventory, accounting, manufacturing, HR and more in one integrated system. Solvetus implements and supports Odoo for European businesses.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Software that unifies a company's core operations — finance, stock, sales, production — in a single system, so data isn't scattered across disconnected tools.
Fractional CIO: A senior technology leader (Chief Information Officer) engaged part-time, giving smaller businesses strategic IT direction without the cost of a full-time executive.
Managed hosting: Hosting where the provider also maintains the server, security, backups and updates — not just rents you the space.
SPF, DKIM & DMARC: Three email-authentication standards that prove your messages genuinely come from your domain. Configured correctly, they keep your email out of spam folders and make spoofing harder.
DNS (Domain Name System): The internet's address book: it maps your domain name to the servers that host your website and email. Misconfigured DNS is behind a surprising number of outages.
eIDAS: An EU regulation governing electronic identification and trust services — including legally recognised electronic signatures — across member states.
GDPR: The EU's General Data Protection Regulation: the law governing how personal data is collected, stored and used. Privacy-first design makes compliance the default.
Data sovereignty: Keeping data under the control of, and subject to the laws of, a chosen jurisdiction — for example European-hosted infrastructure rather than US-only cloud.
Fiscal localization: Adapting an ERP's tax, accounting and invoicing rules to a specific country's regulations (for example Portugal, Switzerland or France).
Microsoft 365: Microsoft's cloud productivity suite — Exchange email, SharePoint, Teams and Office apps — administered as a tenant per organisation.
Google Workspace: Google's cloud productivity suite — Gmail, Drive, Docs and Meet — administered per organisation domain.
Business automation: Connecting your tools and replacing repetitive manual steps with reliable, maintainable workflows (for example with N8N), so data moves without copy-paste.
Digital transformation: Modernising how a business runs — its tools, processes and data — to be faster, safer and less manual, ideally without trading away independence.
WooCommerce: The open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, used to build online stores you fully own rather than renting a marketplace.
Sovereign AI: Artificial intelligence run on infrastructure you control — your own servers or a European-hosted provider — so your data is never sent to a foreign cloud or used to train someone else's model. Typically built on open-weight or European models such as Mistral.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): A technique that grounds an AI model in your own documents: the system retrieves the most relevant passages from your content and gives them to the model as context, so answers are based on your information and can cite their source instead of being invented.
Embeddings: Numeric representations of the meaning of text, used so a computer can find passages that are similar in meaning rather than just matching keywords. They are the foundation of search and RAG in an AI assistant.
CLOUD Act: A US law that allows US authorities to compel a US-based provider to hand over data it controls, even when that data is stored on servers in Europe. It is the core reason an EU-hosted US cloud can be GDPR-compliant yet not sovereign.
Data residency: Where data is physically stored — for example, in a European datacentre. Residency satisfies rules about location, but on its own it does not determine who can legally compel access to the data (see data sovereignty).
Self-hosting: Running software on infrastructure you control — your own servers or a provider you hold the contract with — rather than as a vendor-managed cloud service. It gives full control of your data, location and provider, in exchange for taking on (or delegating) the operational work.
VPS (Virtual Private Server): A server you rent and control entirely — your own slice of a provider's hardware, with full root access. It is the usual foundation for a self-hosted, sovereign stack: you hold the contract, choose the European provider, and decide what runs on it.
Zero-trust network: A security model where no device is trusted by default just for being ‘inside' the network; every connection is authenticated and encrypted. Self-hosted mesh tools such as NetBird apply it without routing your traffic through a third-party cloud.
Single sign-on (SSO): One secure login that grants access to many applications, instead of a separate password for each. Self-hosted identity providers (Authentik, Keycloak) give you SSO across your whole stack while keeping the identity layer under your control.
Reverse proxy: A server that sits in front of your applications and routes incoming web requests to the right one, typically handling HTTPS/TLS certificates centrally. Tools such as Caddy or Nginx Proxy Manager make a multi-service self-hosted stack clean and secure.
Mesh VPN: A virtual private network where devices connect directly to each other in a peer-to-peer mesh rather than through a central concentrator. Self-hosted options such as NetBird give a team secure access to servers and sites without depending on a vendor's cloud.