The bottom line: Digital sovereignty is less an absolute state than rather the conscious ability to select technologies and switch providers when needed without being trapped in dependencies.
The term digital sovereignty is used inflationarily without clarifying its actual meaning. For CDOs, the reality is this: complete independence is unrealistic – what matters more is conscious freedom of choice in technology selection.
Growing dependence on a small number of IT vendors and cloud providers is real: in the cloud, three American hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) dominate the market worldwide. Even when companies resort to instances of these providers hosted geographically in Europe, the parent companies are subject to US law – including the US CLOUD Act. European and German cloud providers do exist, but are often overlooked in favor of established ecosystems and simply extended existing contracts.
For CDOs, one clarification is central: by definition, cloud infrastructure cannot truly be sovereign because it runs physically on foreign servers and the provider retains control. True independence would require that a company operates all IT infrastructure itself, develops and supports all applications, and strictly controls partner interfaces – a model that is unrealistic and economically nonsensical for most organizations. What is more decisive, therefore, is the distinction: instead of digital sovereignty, the goal should be digital freedom of choice – the ability to consciously select technologies, assess their benefit-risk ratio, and switch providers when needed without suffering legal or technical losses.
Concretely, this means companies should ask questions differently: not “Are we completely independent?” but “Where are our critical data? Do we have exit clauses in contracts? Can we fragment sensitive processes and source from alternative providers?” This approach resembles the open-source mindset – the possibility of using and adapting technology, not the illusion that a company fully controls it. For mid-market companies, this means first defining an internal vision of what digital freedom of choice means in their specific context, rather than being guided by rhetorical promises.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 16 July 2026
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