Digital Sovereignty

What is digital sovereignty?

Digital sovereignty is a strategic capability that lets an organization or a state choose, control and, if needed, replace its technology stack, its data and its providers. It goes further than knowing where data is stored or which law applies: it also covers who operates the services, whether data can be moved, and how dependent the business is on a few vendors. For a company, it is a series of decisions taken application by application.

Key takeaways

• Digital sovereignty is an organization's ability to choose, control and, if needed, replace its technology stack, its data and its providers.
• Digital sovereignty is wider than data sovereignty, which concerns the law governing data, and data residency, which concerns where data is stored.
• Digital sovereignty has four dimensions to assess per application: legal jurisdiction, operational control, technological portability and economic concentration on a few vendors.
• Digital sovereignty starts with an inventory, because an IT team cannot control or replace applications, contracts and data flows it does not know about.

How digital sovereignty works

• Legal: which jurisdiction governs the provider, its parent company and its sub-processors, and therefore who can compel access to the data.
• Operational: who runs, supports and administers the service, from where, and whether the company keeps administrator control of its own tenant.
• Technological: whether data and configurations can be exported in usable formats, and whether open standards such as SAML, OpenID Connect or SCIM make a switch realistic.
• Economic: how much spend and how many critical functions sit with a few vendors, and what notice periods and renewal dates allow.
• Inventory first: each dimension is assessed per application, so a complete list of applications, owners and contracts is the precondition for the rest.

Digital sovereignty, data sovereignty or data residency: what is the difference?

• Data residency: where the data is physically stored and processed.
• Data sovereignty: which law governs the data and who can legally require access to it.
• Digital sovereignty: whether the organization can choose, run and replace the whole stack, including software, providers, data and the skills to operate them.

The three nest inside each other. Residency can serve a sovereignty goal but never achieves it alone, and no vendor can certify that a customer is sovereign. Digital sovereignty is a level of dependency the company decides to accept, application by application, and revisits at each renewal.

Examples and use cases

A 200-person engineering firm decides to reduce its dependence on non-European providers for its most sensitive data. The first draft of the plan covers the office suite and the cloud provider. When the IT team pulls the full application list, it finds 85 SaaS tools, 20 of them bought on expense claims by individual teams, several holding client drawings or HR data, and contracts that renew automatically with 90-day notice periods.

The real decisions follow from that list: which tools hold sensitive data, which have an export path, which can be replaced, and which renewal dates leave time to act. Corma provides the list itself, through SaaS discovery including shadow IT and a complete inventory of applications, licenses, costs, contracts and renewals. Corma is hosted in the EU, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified and GDPR compliant, and belongs in the same assessment as any other vendor.

Related concepts

• Data sovereignty
• EU data residency
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• Application portfolio management (APM)
• Corma security and data protection
• Corma SaaS management platform

FAQ

What is the difference between digital sovereignty and data sovereignty?

Data sovereignty is about which law governs data and who can compel access to it. Digital sovereignty is wider: it also covers who operates the services, whether data can be moved and how dependent the organization is on a few vendors.

Does using EU-hosted SaaS make a company digitally sovereign?

No, not by itself. EU hosting addresses data residency, which is one input. The provider's jurisdiction, who operates the service, portability and vendor concentration still have to be assessed.

How do you assess digital sovereignty in a company?

Start with the inventory of applications in use, then rate each one on jurisdiction, operator, portability and spend concentration. Critical applications with the highest dependency come first, and the result is reviewed at each renewal.

Why does digital sovereignty matter to an IT manager?

It decides whether the company can switch provider when terms, prices or laws change, and whether it can answer customers and auditors who ask about its dependencies.

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