The point: Data sovereignty demands technical control over data access and encryption, not merely storage in regulatorily acceptable data centers.
Data sovereignty is often reduced to storage locations. Yet for CDOs and IT managers, it increasingly matters who can technically read, decrypt and access data — regardless of contractually guaranteed access restrictions.
Organizations today store sensitive data in cloud services — from contracts and technical drawings to government submissions. When selecting such systems, the storage location frequently takes center stage. European data centers of global providers are promoted as the solution for compliance and trust. But this simplification does not do justice to reality.
Data residency (the physical storage location) is not equivalent to data sovereignty (who has technical and legal control). A cloud service can host data in Europe while the provider is subject to US jurisdiction. On the basis of the US Cloud Act, lawful requests for disclosure can then affect data stored in Europe — regardless of contractual assurances. The crucial difference: a provider may be contractually excluded. Technically, however, its system architecture may still enable access.
CDOs and management must therefore ask control questions that go beyond contracts. Is data encrypted end-to-end? Who manages the cryptographic keys? Is access by the provider and unauthorized third parties technically excluded? How granularly can access permissions be controlled? Data sovereignty does not arise from contractual arrangements or data locality alone — it must be technically guaranteed by the system architecture.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 20 July 2026
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