Digital sovereignty: from buzzword to business imperative

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.

Delivering enterprise-ready open source solutions requires:

Dedicated product security and compliance teams.
A clear product lifecycle.
Extensive testing and certification with hardware and software partners.
Ongoing contributions back to upstream communities.

A sovereign technology approach: platform, portability, and people

Digital sovereignty is not a binary state. Different workloads, teams, and industries will sit at different points on a sovereignty spectrum. Any serious sovereignty strategy therefore has three pillars:

1. Platform

The technology foundation must be a robust, commercially supported open source distribution hardened for security. This includes:

Continuous security work: Ongoing bug fixes and patches driven by dedicated teams.
Compliance capabilities: Alignment with sector-specific regulations (e.g., FSI, healthcare).
Predictable lifecycle: Long-term support options and upgrade paths.
Open source assurance: Legal safeguards and indemnification around intellectual property.

2. Portability

Sovereignty is about choice regarding where workloads run. A consistent platform architecture allows deployment across on-premise data centers, regional private clouds, and global public clouds (Open Hybrid Cloud). This ensures:

Application portability: No need for code rewrites when rebalancing infrastructure.
Consistent operations: Unified policies and security controls across the estate.
Reduced provider lock-in: Ability to move workloads as risk or cost profiles change.

3. People

It also matters who can access support data and logs. For many regulated environments, it is expected that:

Technical support is delivered by verified local citizens.
Support staff operate physically on local soil.
Diagnostic data remains within the region and is not co-mingled with other jurisdictions.

AI as a catalyst for sovereignty

Artificial intelligence requires access to large volumes of sensitive data, raising questions around residency and governance. Sovereign AI is primarily an infrastructure and data control discussion:

Infrastructure: Jurisdictionally controlled environments to run AI.

Data: Guaranteed residency and lawful use of training/inference data.

IP Management: Managing risk around models while maintaining innovation speed.

A pragmatic approach often involves adapting existing open models while ensuring the surrounding infrastructure and data environment remains sovereign.

A pragmatic policy approach to sovereignty

European institutions have taken a leading role in digital regulation, but policymakers must balance strategic goals with operational realities:

Sovereignty has natural limits: Global supply chains are deeply intertwined; absolute geographical exclusion is difficult to implement.
Risk tolerance varies: Mission-critical defense systems require stricter constraints than internal collaboration tools.
Pragmatism over knee-jerk reactions: Rather than sweeping bans, organizations should quantify risk and design transition paths that strengthen resilience.

Sovereignty as enabler

Underneath the headlines lie real operational questions about infrastructure control, data residency, and service resilience. Open source, particularly enterprise-grade distributions, offers a way to address these questions. When paired with an open hybrid cloud architecture and regionally anchored support, it gives organizations meaningful choice over their digital destiny.