What is digital sovereignty?

Digital sovereignty is an organization’s ability to control its digital assets—deciding where its data lives, how its systems run, and who has access to them. 

Think of it as companies “reigning” over their data and technology, rather than handing control to an external provider. 

Digital sovereignty can apply to infrastructure, operations, AI workloads, and more.

Check out digital sovereignty solutions by Red Hat

Both enterprises and governments can pursue digital sovereignty. Some governments have laws that define and enforce digital control across their jurisdictions—like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU) or the United States’ Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act. These laws aim to protect consumers and intellectual property, preserve self-reliance and resilience, and reduce risk. 

In this article, we’ll focus on digital sovereignty for enterprises. 

Explore digital sovereignty strategies for service providers 

Think of digital sovereignty as buying a car versus renting or leasing one. Owning a car can give you more freedom, privacy, flexibility, and independence. But it also requires upfront costs, maintenance, and a valid driver’s license. 

Just like owning a car, digital sovereignty is a big responsibility and can be a lot of work. But it might be worth the investment for organizations that want: 

• Business continuity. With digital sovereignty, you're in control if things go wrong rather than having to rely on a third-party provider. 

  When you control your systems, you can ensure they’re portable and interoperable. That way you can migrate during an unexpected disruption or immediately access your software, support, and models in a worst-case scenario. All these factors can help you keep operations running on your own terms.

• Vendor flexibility. With digital sovereignty, you can freely choose different tools and services from various vendors. 

  Controlling your own infrastructure helps reduce outage risk, makes it easier to switch vendors, and keeps your options open.

• Risk management. Digital sovereignty helps protect your critical infrastructure from disruptions outside your control and reduce exposure to risks before they happen.

  Relying on external providers—who have their own priorities—can create unwanted vulnerabilities. When you control your infrastructure, data, and vendors, you can limit dependencies that could introduce security, compliance, or geopolitical risks. 

In summary, digital sovereignty is a sound strategy for organizations that want to “own their car” and trade the convenience of “renting” for autonomy.

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Let’s break digital sovereignty into 4 pillars that support the overall strategy to control digital assets.

1. Data sovereignty is about following local laws when you create, store, and use data. Data is usually subject to the laws of the country in which it’s collected or processed, though international regulations sometimes apply. This also applies to AI models and training data. These laws vary from country to country. 

   For example, data collected in Germany must comply with GDPR guidelines. 

2. Technical sovereignty is about controlling how your systems are built. When you design your technology to be portable and interoperable, it can move between environments and work with different technologies. Using open standards and open source technologies can also help reduce dependence on a single vendor’s proprietary infrastructure or software. This makes it easier to adopt new tools, change environments, and evolve your architecture without having to rebuild everything.

   For example, when a company decides which workloads run on-premise and which run in the cloud, it’s not constrained by a provider’s limited architecture. 

3. Operational sovereignty is about controlling how your systems are run, accessed, and maintained on a day-to-day basis. When you decide how to operate, manage, and monitor your infrastructure, you can verify who has access to your systems and make sure they run reliably. 

   For example,when your in-house IT team controls who can access systems, respond to incidents, and make changes immediately, it doesn’t have to wait for a vendor to take necessary action. 

4. Assurance sovereignty is about keeping your technology secure, reliable, and compliant on your own terms. This means regularly testing your systems, confirming they meet local legal requirements, and running audits to stay up-to-date on policy. Verification also extends to IT infrastructure, software, and operations.

   For example, a healthcare provider audits its own systems to keep patient data private and adhere to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements. 

Find out why digital sovereignty is more than just compliance

Digital sovereignty is about keeping control of your technology within your organization, even if you’re working with third-party providers. 

Data sovereignty (1 of the 4 pillars of digital sovereignty) regulates data—as well as AI models and training data—under the laws of the country in which it’s collected, stored, or processed. It’s where legal compliance and corporate strategy overlap. 

Data is subject to local laws, even when a parent company or datacenters are located elsewhere. This can be tricky when collecting data on a global scale. 

For example, if a U.S.-based company has a location in Paris, it collects customer data in France. That data must comply with EU laws like GDPR, even though the parent company is based in the U.S.

It’s important not to confuse digital and data sovereignty—or mix them up with another related term: Cyberspace sovereignty refers to governments asserting control over the internet through laws and censorship within their jurisdictions. 

For example, some countries restrict access to content that others allow to flow freely. 

Two other important terms to keep in mind when discussing digital sovereignty and governance are:

• Data residency: This refers to where data is physically stored. In our example, data residency is in France.
• Data localization: This refers to laws that require certain data to be stored and sometimes processed within a country’s jurisdiction. In our example, the U.S.-based company may be required to keep the data collected in France within the EU or comply with approved transfer processes. 

In summary, digital sovereignty gives you control over your corporate technology and infrastructure decisions, whereas data sovereignty applies specific laws to local data. Together, these practices allow companies to operate abroad and avoid fines.

Any business that stores, processes, or transfers data should make sure data sovereignty plays a part in its legal, privacy, and security strategies.

Digital sovereignty appeals to so many organizations because it provides control and assurance. When you oversee your entire digital landscape, you get to decide how to manage your infrastructure, data, and security. This level of autonomy can improve:

• Regulatory compliance. You can ensure you follow local data laws and control global data transfers internally. This can help improve your overall security and business continuity.
• Operational resilience. When you’re in charge of disaster recovery plans, you can move and adjust workloads in your own time instead of having to wait for vendor approval.
• Risk management. Relying less on external platforms reduces exposure to provider outages and makes it clear who is responsible for security.
• Cost visibility. Sovereignty doesn’t automatically reduce costs, but it does improve cost transparency, so you can adjust your resources and budget accordingly.
• AI governance and model control. Instead of outsourcing AI completely, you control your training data, model updates, and how AI is deployed. This lets you fine-tune and customize AI systems in a way that fits your business needs. It also provides an extra layer of security that becomes important for tightly regulated business sectors like healthcare and finance. 

With more control, organizations gain more flexibility, clearer governance, and a more sustainable long-term technology strategy.

But remember: Achieving the highest level of control over all aspects of your technology may not be beneficial for everyone. Some platforms are more successful on a public cloud. Your workloads are where you’ll likely want to hold the decision-making power and maintain digital sovereignty.

There’s a reason some organizations don’t jump at the opportunity to maintain all of their technology. It can be a lot to handle for companies of all sizes. 

Digital sovereignty means you’re responsible for maintaining compliance, supply chain, data residency, AI, and more. And there are several obstacles when it comes to controlling it all at once: 

• Cost: Digital sovereignty typically requires an upfront investment in and maintenance of your own infrastructure, software, and data governance platforms. Hybrid or multicloud architectures can be costly but will help you stay flexible as technology evolves. 

  Remember: Sovereignty doesn’t mean you have to rebuild everything. But it does mean you’ll want to consider sovereign requirements when building infrastructure. 

• Talent: Organizing and funding the right team can be difficult. To achieve digital sovereignty, you need local experts—like platform and security engineers—who understand your specific use cases.
• Regulatory compliance: Data often comes from multiple countries, each with its own laws. These regulations can overlap or even conflict. They also change often, so it’s important to track them closely to avoid operational delays and security risks.
• Vendor lock-in: It can be difficult to untangle digital assets from proprietary vendors without disrupting ongoing business. Migration requires careful planning and well-designed architecture to avoid new risks.
• Organizational complexity: Your IT, security, finance, legal, and executive teams all need to work together. For your strategy to stay on track, make sure your teams share the same priorities for sovereignty. 

Digital sovereignty strategies come with different levels of control and complexity, so the challenges will vary depending on your use case. 

• Self-managed infrastructure provides the most control, but likely requires the largest investment and most maintenance.
• Sovereign cloud solutions can also be costly upfront and come with a range of provider limitations.
• Hybrid or multicloud architectures provide the most flexibility but come with operational complexities and governance requirements for different environments.

Once again, it’s helpful to remember the car analogy. Your digital sovereignty solution will present a trade-off: more control and independence versus less complexity and a lower upfront investment.

A sovereign cloud is a cloud environment built to enforce 3 layers of control: where data lives, which laws apply to it, and who operates the infrastructure. 

• Data sovereignty, along with data residency and localization, defines where data can be stored and how it can be moved to comply with local legal requirements.
• Legal jurisdiction defines which laws apply to the data and who has access to it. It limits access by foreign governments and third parties, such as cloud provider staff who manage the underlying systems.
• Operational control determines who operates the infrastructure. This often includes locally operated infrastructure, regional support teams, and strict identity and access management controls. 

Sovereignty is a spectrum. Some sovereign clouds focus primarily on data residency, while others provide additional layers that cover strict operational and legal access.

It’s easy to confuse sovereign cloud with other popular cloud terms like multicloud or hybrid cloud. But sovereign cloud is about more than just being flexible, maintaining compliance, or encrypting data. 

A sovereign cloud’s infrastructure helps enforce control over data, operations, and jurisdiction, while still providing the benefit of flexible, scalable cloud computing. Sovereign clouds support data protection and compliance, but organizations are still responsible for governance, configuration, and internal security practices. 

Your cloud, your rules: Read Red Hat’s commitment for sovereign cloud

Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to prevent, defend against, and recover from malicious attacks, system failures, and supply chain disruptions. It’s a key element to supporting digital sovereignty: If you don’t control your technology, you can’t fully control how you protect it. 

Let’s break down 3 key steps to maintaining cyber resilience:

• Prevention: It’s helpful to identify vulnerabilities before bad actors can take advantage of them. A proactive security strategy uses strict access controls, considers zero trust architectures, and continuously monitors for unusual behavior. Risks can be both data breaches from outside the company as well as internal threats.
• Defense: Your primary goal during a cyberattack is containment. Close the gap that allowed access to your technology in the 1st place and isolate the affected systems. Try to maintain critical business functions in unaffected areas.
• Recovery: Your plan for the events following an attack should include restoring systems from trusted backups, eliminating existing vulnerabilities, repairing what’s been tampered with, and making a plan to improve whatever gaps were left open to attackers. Rebuilding trust with your customers is also part of recovery. 

Sovereign infrastructure gives you more authority over how you secure, monitor, and restore your systems, instead of having to rely on a third party.

Read about Red Hat and the EU Cyber Resilience Act

Sovereign AI applies digital sovereignty principles to AI systems like platforms, models, workloads, and data. It gives you control over how to develop, deploy, and operate your AI systems, so they reflect your values and legal requirements.

It’s a shift from renting AI to owning AI. 

Rather than paying a tech giant (like OpenAI or Google) to use their AI systems, sovereign AI lets you build, own, and operate AI on your own terms. 

Sovereign AI doesn’t always mean you have to own your models. You could also host open source models internally, run AI in infrastructure that meets regional legal requirements, or deploy within a sovereign cloud. 

Owning your AI is the most expensive option, but it also provides the most control over privacy, governance, and intellectual property—if managed correctly. 

But AI is changing almost daily, which creates new challenges for digital sovereignty. This evolution expands the need for governance and changes the way we prioritize infrastructure and data control.

Learn more about sovereign AI

Red Hat’s open source solutions support digital sovereignty by keeping you in control. Our platforms and services give you the tools to manage your own data and technology. 

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That’s why we focus on these key elements:

• Transparency. Products like Red Hat® AI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, and Red Hat OpenShift® give you visibility into your software so you can understand exactly how your systems operate.
• Hybrid cloud architecture. Your applications can run anywhere—on-premise, on local provider clouds, or at the edge—with a single, consistent platform.
• Interoperability. This means no vendor lock-in. Red Hat builds on open standards that allow you to mix and match different tools from different vendors that meet your needs.
• Open source innovation. Global developer communities are constantly iterating on open source projects, which in turn helps improve Red Hat products. This means more ideas and less tunnel vision from single-company roadmaps.
• Control. When you oversee your deployments, you can achieve greater operational sovereignty. Tailor your deployments and workloads to your needs to get the best result for your use cases. 

Open source software can help you boost your digital sovereignty—no matter where you’re located. Red Hat provides digital sovereignty solutions to customers in countries all over the world. 

See how Red Hat supports sovereignty in the EU