The Sovereign Cloud Imperative

Uncertain times call for greater operational control and IT resiliency, which is why so many organisations are now exploring the issue of digital sovereignty.

At this midway point in 2025, you hardly need to be an expert in global geopolitics to feel uneasy about the state of the world. From flare-ups in regional conflicts to volatile trade dynamics have placed fresh concerns on international supply chains for both physical and digital goods, with the potential to affect everyone, everywhere, to some extent.

Against this febrile backdrop, it’s no surprise that I’m frequently asked by business leaders for my thoughts on digital sovereignty. While personal definitions of the term may vary, the intention behind the questions is pretty consistent. To put it simply, organisations are looking to strengthen and enhance the security of IT ecosystems in ways that mitigate dependencies on foreign technology and associated political influence, while actively supporting compliance with local regulations. Open source solutions provide a pathway to this manner of independence that moves beyond geographical borders. 

At market research company Gartner, analysts have predicted that over 50% of multinational organisations will have digital sovereignty strategies in place by 2029, up from less than 10% today. 

The good news is that while the current global outlook may be wildly uncertain, Red Hat’s message on digital sovereignty is clear and concise. For us, it’s a question of ‘Your cloud, your rules.” Digital sovereignty might be a relatively new term, but our enterprise open source technology is tried and trusted when it comes to delivering the levels of control, consistency and resilience that organisations are seeking in turbulent times. 

Navigating choppy waters

So how are we helping customers to achieve these goals and navigate choppy international waters? In short, it’s down to our open hybrid cloud strategy, which focuses on workload portability and deployment flexibility, built on a foundation of open source technology.

At its heart, a hybrid cloud strategy gives IT teams the ability to pick and choose between cloud solutions that provide the best fit for each individual task or workload. This means that organisations can use our technology to more seamlessly migrate workloads across major cloud providers, emerging sovereign managed clouds or their on-premise environments – and to do so rapidly in direct response to new and emerging risks and requirements. 

Just as importantly, our open hybrid cloud strategy provides customers with a solid technology foundation for launching new initiatives, such as automating resource-intensive tasks using artificial intelligence (AI) or adopting new detection techniques that enable them to stay one step ahead of sophisticated cyberattacks. 

It’s about using technology to create consistency – in our case, a standardised operating environment (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), a more consistent application development and deployment platform (Red Hat OpenShift) and a unified set of tools for automating IT management (Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform). Our commitment to open source technology and alignment with appropriate open source licenses, including GNU Public License (GPL) and more, is fundamental to digital sovereignty, offering customers the independence and control they seek while nurturing open source talent and communities essential for long-term self-sufficiency.  

The idea of a ‘sovereign cloud’, meanwhile, takes the idea one step further, by focusing on the deployment of cloud workloads according to the national and regional rules around data privacy, residency and control, as well as national security and economic considerations.  

Recent IDC research, sponsored by Red Hat, shows that 50% of the European organisations surveyed plan to adopt sovereign cloud solutions in 2025 in order to enhance cybersecurity, expand cloud adoption and meet compliance needs.

Sovereign cloud decisions

Red Hat’s technology can take companies a long way and in the right direction when it comes to meeting the challenges of deploying, managing and strengthening the security posture of sovereign cloud set-ups. We do this through the provision of orchestration, workload portability, certified enterprise software and integrated support, all delivered via our open hybrid cloud platforms. In the process, these organisations benefit from the contributions and insights of a worldwide community of contributors, users and developers driving open source innovation. 

At the same time, I can’t understate the role played by our ecosystem of technology partners in helping customers reach their final destination. We know that to achieve a sovereign cloud that works for them and that will flex to accommodate further needs, they will rely on a wide range of both hyperscalers and regional cloud providers, as well as global and local systems integrators and ISVs to tackle very specific situations and challenges in different parts of the world. 

It’s very common for companies to need external expert advice on these issues. In a recent post about digital sovereignty, experts from the World Economic Forum (WEF) make the following observation: “A roadmap for sovereign cloud implementation typically includes strategic planning, regulatory compliance analysis and careful cloud vendor selection. Organisations must consider factors such as data classification, metadata management and cross-border data transfer restrictions when designing their sovereign cloud architecture.”

At Red Hat, we don’t think any organisation should be struggling to make these decisions in isolation. With our focus on control and transparency, our commitment to open source and our strong partner ecosystem, we’re confident we can help them achieve the digital sovereignty they need to shape their own digital destiny and weather any storm that the global economy throws in their direction.