SUSE Releases Cloud Sovereignty Framework Self Assessment

Brussels - January 29, 2026 -  Global open source leader SUSE today launched a Cloud Sovereignty Framework Self Assessment to help customers understand gaps in their digital strategy. Designed to evaluate against the 2025 EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, this industry-first tool is a web-based, self-service discovery platform available to organizations wanting to know how their infrastructure scores against the framework. 

According to Forrester,  digital and AI sovereignty will drive a private cloud renaissance with doubled year-on-year growth in 2026¹. With the 2025 EU Framework now introduced, organizations risk contract ineligibility without proven digital sovereignty. The Cloud Sovereignty Framework Self Assessment simplifies this journey, providing an objective Sovereignty Effective Assurance Levels (SEAL) score, a way to measure an organization’s sovereignty on the eight objectives defined by the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework.  This streamlines a manual and resource intensive approach to an automated, 20 minute visibility tool.

“Organizations are facing a ‘black box’ problem when it comes to digital sovereignty, which creates significant hidden risks. There is a policy-to-technology gap with a disconnect between regulatory requirements and the technical stack needed to fix identified vulnerabilities across infrastructure,” said Andreas Prins, head of Global Sovereign Solutions at SUSE. “However, without a clear sovereignty score, IT leaders cannot justify the budget needed for digital autonomy initiatives. The Cloud Sovereignty Assessment Tool provides exactly that score and a roadmap for how to close the gap leveraging SUSE solutions and its European partner ecosystem.” 

"The Cloud Sovereignty Framework self-assessment tool is a game-changer for IT strategy. In just 15 minutes, I gained more insight than ever before” said Markus Scherer, infrastructure and architecture engineer at University of Luxembourg. “Simply answering the questions provided immediate clarity on our current sovereignty level, but the real value lies in the final recommendations. It delivered tangible results that I can confidently present to my leadership to influence our future IT investment decisions." 

Key features include: 

• The SEAL benchmark: It maps the organization to one of five Sovereignty Effective Assurance Levels (SEAL 0–4). This creates a common language for organizations to discuss risk (e.g., "We are currently SEAL-1, but our public sector contracts require SEAL-3").

• Weighted risk analysis: Not all gaps are equal. The tool weighs eight sovereignty objectives (SOVs), prioritizing supply chain (20%) and operational autonomy (15%), showing exactly where the most critical vulnerabilities lie.

• Trust-based engagement: Unlike typical SaaS tools, this is "privacy-first." Results are stored only in the user’s browser, which lowers the barrier for high-security organizations to engage without fear of data leakage. 

• Consultative roadmap: It transforms a vague "sovereignty" conversation into a concrete improvement plan that can be downloaded as a PDF. 

Organizations can take the self-assessment here. To discover how SUSE can help organizations close the gap in their digital sovereignty strategies please visit here and here. 

About SUSE
SUSE is a global leader in enterprise open source software, across Linux operating systems, Kubernetes container management, Edge solutions and AI. The majority of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to provide resilient infrastructure, enabling IT leaders to optimize cost and manage heterogeneous environments.  SUSE collaborates with partners and communities to provide organizations with choices to maximize their current IT systems and innovate with next-generation technologies across traditional on-premises, to cloud native, multi-cloud to edge and beyond. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

1. Forrester: Predictions 2026: Cloud Computing, Oct 21, 2025