Digital Sovereignty: Is It a Short-Term Fix or a Long-Term Board Mandate?

Key takeaways:

• Digital sovereignty is a board-level and C-suite issue, not a side project for IT.
• Deliberate and risk-based choices about your data, workloads and support are essential for sovereignty.
• Open source is core to sovereignty because it promotes transparency, portability and freedom from vendor lock-in.

Digital sovereignty spans cross-border data regulation, AI governance and geopolitical risk. For many, that expansiveness and complexity make sovereignty a tempting topic to defer. Today, however, deferral creates new risks of its own.

Across organizations, digital sovereignty has shifted from a niche IT concern to a recurring board-level theme. It increasingly sits alongside cybersecurity and operational resilience. And instead of asking whether sovereignty matters, leaders want to hear plans for turning an abstract mandate into a realistic, long-term plan.

The Building a Future-Proof Digital Sovereignty Strategy webinar is now available on-demand. Listen in as leaders at Forrester, SUSE, T-Systems and OVHcloud discuss:

• How urgent and important is digital sovereignty to the most senior leaders in business? Should enterprises treat this as a short- or long-term investment?
• How can global technologies be balanced with local execution and control? Is a ‘glocal’ or hybrid strategy viable?
• What are the key considerations when adopting a holistic approach to digital sovereignty? Does the use of open source technology provide an advantage? 

Treat digital sovereignty as a long-term board mandate

Sector regulators, extraterritorial data laws and accelerating AI adoption are just some of the factors that are raising the stakes on sovereignty. There is new urgency surrounding questions of where data lives, who can access it and under what legal regime. 

While some industries and geographic regions have invested in sovereignty for years, others are just starting to address the topic. SUSE’s on-demand webinar, Building a Future-Proof Digital Sovereignty Strategy, brings together industry leaders to explore the variety of organizational responses. The conversation starts with an overview of the analysis in Forrester’s new report: Leverage Digital Sovereignty to Break Free From Foreign Influences on Your IT Stack.

A well-structured framework for digital sovereignty can position your organization to succeed on multiple fronts. You will be better able to adapt as regulations, technologies and geopolitics evolve. Even if external pressures are secondary to your organization’s internal sovereignty goals, regulations can nonetheless provide helpful deadlines and accountability drivers.

In stepping back, the foregrounding of digital sovereignty may feel somewhat familiar. Cybersecurity and business continuity were once considered specialized, one-off projects. Most enterprises now prioritize such issues, as reflected in their dedicated funding and multi-year roadmaps.

Balance global reach with local control

When sovereignty rises to board-level significance, that should not automatically catalyze an all-or-nothing outlook. Immediate action is essential, but so are incremental and organizationally-specific steps. For sovereignty, the most effective governing mindset will span a decade or more. Think of it as a staged, risk-based journey that starts with the most exposed areas and grows over time. 

To best support their unique and evolving needs, some companies are embracing a “glocal” sovereignty model. With such an approach, you retain the scale and economics of global cloud services while still asserting local control over the data and workloads that demand it. For example, you might keep core payment systems and customer-identifying data in a sovereign cloud operated by a national provider. Simultaneously, you could continue using global cloud services for lower-risk analytics or developer tooling. 

Across regulated industries, this kind of segmentation is increasingly common. It’s an approach that requires carefully classifying workloads by sensitivity and mapping jurisdictional requirements. It also means accepting some trade-offs in cost, complexity and skills.

By taking a deliberate stance, your technology sovereignty strategy will become a designed set of dependencies. Effectively managing a previously ad hoc accumulation of risk is well worth the investment.

Map your first steps toward holistic sovereignty

A clear sovereignty strategy rarely manifests all at once. For many enterprises, a more realistic starting point is minimum viable sovereignty. With this perspective, you define what “sovereign enough” looks like for your most critical assets. You then expand this definition, and enact related changes, over time.

In articulating what digital sovereignty means for your unique organization, consider three dimensions: data, technical infrastructure and operational processes. You will need to inventory your highest-risk workloads and data flows. You’ll also need to identify the dependencies that would be hardest to unwind. These often include dominant vendors, single-region hosting and support teams that live or work outside your jurisdiction.

To seamlessly shift the sovereignty discussion from high-level ambition to concrete action, it may be helpful to reference existing models. For example, the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework is a well-vetted scorecard for assessing cloud services in the EU. Its scoring rubric covers multiple dimensions that directly relate to sovereignty: ownership, jurisdiction, data and AI control, operations, supply chain, technology openness, security and sustainability.

Once you have defined your own organization’s data, infrastructure and operations baselines, you can set actionable principles for where specific data and support must reside. Some enterprises’ definitions of operational sovereignty lead to practical choices like EU-based engineers and jurisdiction-specific storage for support data. In such cases, services like SUSE Sovereign Premium Support can provide a bridge for meeting these strategic requirements.

Previously, your organization may have let cloud and SaaS decisions grow organically. When you define a minimum viable posture, you inherently adopt a more intentional approach. Those first steps become the foundation of a multi-year digital sovereignty roadmap and overall perspective shift. You will start to intuitively think about data by sensitivity, associate workloads with jurisdictions and visualize where different types of work can run. 

Use open source to unlock real sovereignty

Serious, long-term sovereignty is hard to achieve without open source software. Code transparency supports auditability. Portability preserves the freedom to move workloads across clouds or back on-premises. And if an underlying stack is both transparent and portable, no single provider can become an unmovable dependency.

It is no accident that many sovereignty discussions return to open standards and open source. When digital sovereignty is built on open source, you achieve more durable control. Across sectors, many leaders look to open technologies to keep their options open. Such ecosystems distribute control across communities rather than concentrating it in a single vendor’s roadmap. By building on open source, you provide a clear runway for your minimum viable sovereignty to mature into a comprehensive, resilient posture.

Turn today’s questions into a long-term sovereignty plan

Three years ago, most cloud questions focused on cost and uptime. Today, the same conversations probe jurisdictions, AI training data and provider concentration. 

Digital sovereignty is not a status you achieve overnight. Rather, the path forward is incremental but intentional. For many, it requires glocal architectures, an initial minimum viable sovereignty phase and an open source foundation that preserves choice. 

Our on-demand webinar, Building a Future-Proof Digital Sovereignty Strategy, unpacks these themes further, offering a closer look at how sovereignty is reshaping enterprise technology strategy. Register today for access. And get ready to stress-test your own sovereignty roadmap.