Digital sovereignty has outgrown its niche as an IT concern and is now firmly on the boardroom agenda. This has been fueled in no small part by geopolitical concerns. However, while geopolitics may have pushed it into the spotlight, at its core digital sovereignty is about one thing: keeping the business running no matter what happens.
When critical systems fail, there is always a cost. For office productivity suites, that cost shows up in lost hours and missed deadlines. For financial services, healthcare, government, or critical infrastructure, outages can disrupt essential services, undermine trust, and create direct financial and societal impact. These costs are quantifiable, and regulators are increasingly demanding that organizations understand and mitigate the underlying risk.
That is why digital sovereignty is best understood as a matter of business continuity and operational resilience. It is about reducing dependencies: on specific providers that operate under foreign regulations that may conflict with local legislation, on systems with opaque architectures, and on single points of failure in the tech stack.
Open source as the foundation of sovereignty
Transparency sits at the heart of any credible sovereignty strategy. You cannot meaningfully control what you cannot inspect. Open source is thus a natural foundation for sovereignty, because it provides visibility into the software stack. organizations can understand what tech is running in their environments, assess their security posture more rigorously, and avoid being tied to closed source implementations. That transparency helps build assurance – for internal risk owners, external auditors, and regulators. It helps to keep organizations at the forefront of innovation as well. These days, most of the critical innovations in infrastructure and cloud-native computing originate in open communities, with contributions not only coming from individual developers, but major technology companies as well.
That said, not all open source is created equal. There is a major distinction between raw community code and enterprise-ready open source. Enterprise open source builds on community innovation, but adds the security focus, lifecycle management, compliance, and technical support that business-critical workloads demand. The result is that enterprise-grade solutions give organizations the benefits of openness and development velocity of the open source community, but with the guardrails in place to run regulated, high-stakes environments.
Delivering enterprise-ready open source solutions requires extra legwork from the provider: dedicated product security and compliance teams, a clear product lifecycle, extensive testing and certification with hardware and software partners, and ongoing contributions back to upstream communities. In return, organizations gain a stable, supported software solution that preserves the freedoms of open source: inspectable code, flexibility in deployment models, and the ability to maintain continuity even if commercial relationships change over time.
This combination of transparency and enterprise-grade assurance is what makes open source a practical foundation for sovereignty.
A sovereign technology approach: platform, portability, and people
Ultimately, the core concern is risk management across technology, data, and operations. Digital sovereignty is not a binary state. Different workloads, teams, and industries will sit at different points on a sovereignty spectrum, depending on their risk tolerance, regulatory environment, and cost profile. The question is not whether an organisation is sovereign or not. The real challenge is designing a technology strategy and finding out where each workload needs to sit on that spectrum – and how easily it can move when circumstances change, without forcing a complete rebuild every time requirements shift. That, in turn, requires a structured approach to the platform, where and how it runs, and who is allowed to support it.
This focus on risk must cover the entire tech supply chain, from software to hardware. Understanding and mitigating dependencies across this full stack (including diversifying hardware vendors) is crucial for enhanced operational resilience and business continuity. Any serious sovereignty strategy therefore has three pillars: the platform itself, where and how it can run, and who is allowed to support it.
1. Platform
The technology foundation must be a robust, commercially supported open source distribution that is hardened for security and aligned with relevant regulations. This includes:
- Continuous security work, including ongoing bug fixes, vulnerability management and, patches driven by dedicated security teams.
- Compliance capabilities that help align the platform with sector-specific regulations in areas such as financial services, public sector, healthcare, and critical infrastructure.
- A clear and predictable lifecycle, with long-term support options and upgrade paths that avoid disruptive, unplanned changes and give organizations time to plan transitions.
- An open source assurance program that provides legal safeguards and indemnification around intellectual property claims, so organizations can confidently build on and extend open source without introducing additional legal risk into their stack.
2. Portability
Sovereignty is also about choice – where workloads run today, and where they may need to run tomorrow. A modern approach uses a consistent platform architecture that can be deployed across multiple environments: on-premise data centers, regional private or sovereign clouds, and global public clouds. Call it an open hybrid cloud model, or simply call it hybrid or multicloud. The key is that the same container platform, automation, and management tools can be used across all of these environments, so that:
- Applications are portable, without needing to be re-written each time an organization rebalances between on-premise, regional, or global infrastructure.
- Operational teams can apply consistent policies, security controls, and automation across the entire estate.
- Organizations can reduce overdependence on any single infrastructure provider, because workloads can move when risk, regulation, or cost profiles change.
That flexibility is particularly relevant now that many enterprises are reconsidering earlier “cloud-first” decisions. Rather than a one-way migration, the industry is moving toward a more nuanced “right workload, right place” approach – with some systems repatriated on-premise, others shifting to regional cloud providers, and some remaining on global hyperscalers. A flexible, open platform makes that rebalancing feasible without introducing unnecessary complexity or cost.
3. People
Technology and data location are only part of the sovereignty equation. It also matters who can access support data, logs, and diagnostic artefacts. For many European organizations for example, especially in highly regulated environments, it is no longer sufficient that data be stored in-region. They also expect that:
- Technical support is delivered by verified local citizens.
- Support staff operate physically on local soil.
- Support cases, logs, and other diagnostic data remain within the region and are not co-mingled with data from other jurisdictions.
This “people dimension” turns sovereignty from a pure infrastructure question into a people, process, and technology (platform) challenge. It is also where confirmed sovereign support models come into play: dedicated support teams of local citizens, operating on local soil, working within regional data boundaries. Combined with an open hybrid cloud platform, this gives organizations a realistic path to digital sovereignty that goes beyond slogans and directly supports business continuity.
AI as a catalyst for sovereignty
Artificial intelligence has become one of the strongest drivers of digital sovereignty initiatives. On the one hand, organizations want to invest in AI to accelerate innovation, improve services, and support local economic growth. On the other, AI workloads require access to large volumes of sensitive data both for training and for inference. That combination naturally raises questions around where data lives, who can access it, and under which laws it is governed.
This has led to growing interest in sovereign AI. In practice, sovereign AI is primarily an infrastructure and data control discussion:
- Do you have sovereign or jurisdictionally controlled infrastructure on which to run AI workloads?
- Can you guarantee the residency, protection, and lawful use of the data used to train and operate AI models?
- Can you manage IP risk around models and training data while still innovating at full speed?
What sovereign AI does not necessarily mean is that every country or region must build its own foundational models from scratch. In many cases, the pragmatic approach is to use or adapt existing open models, but to ensure that the infrastructure and data environment around those models is sovereign. If those two elements are under local control and compliant with regulations, the resulting AI capabilities can credibly be considered sovereign as well.
A pragmatic policy approach to sovereignty
European institutions have taken a leading role in digital regulation. That brings real benefits in terms of data protection, security, and resilience – but it also creates complexity for policymakers who must balance long-term strategic goals with current operational realities.
First, sovereignty has natural limits. Global supply chains for both hardware and software are deeply intertwined after decades of globalization. Absolute, black-and-white requirements that technology must never originate from certain geographies can be extremely difficult to implement and unwind in practice, especially within the timeframes that political cycles often demand.
Second, risk tolerance and cost structures differ. Not every organization – or even every workload within the same organization – requires the same level of sovereignty. Mission-critical systems in defense or critical infrastructure may justify far stricter constraints than internal collaboration tools. Enterprises are looking for these nuances to be taken into account as it’s not a one-size-fits-all situation.
Third, we need pragmatism over knee-jerk reactions. High-profile incidents can create pressure for sweeping bans or abrupt policy shifts. In many cases, a better path is to take stock: understand existing dependencies, quantify risk, and then design transition paths that strengthen resilience without discarding decades of accumulated expertise, investment, and open source innovation.
Sovereignty as enabler
The discussions around digital sovereignty generate a lot of noise. Underneath the headlines, however, lie very real operational questions about who controls critical infrastructure, where data lives, how resilient essential services are, and how organizations can innovate without unacceptable risk.
Open source, and enterprise open source in particular, provides a credible way to address those questions. It offers transparency, fosters innovation, and – when paired with an open hybrid cloud architecture and regionally anchored support models – gives organizations meaningful choice over their digital destiny.
This article was submitted by Red Hat.