Digital sovereignty and the cloud: how to make the most of collaboration with hyperscalers
Today, the cloud is not only a driver of efficiency, scalability and flexibility in processes and digital transformation strategies, but also serves as a key infrastructure for industrial competitiveness, operational resilience and organisations’ ability to maintain control over their digital assets, playing a central role in digital sovereignty. The European Commission’s new proposals on this matter, and in particular the new Tech Sovereignty Package, address precisely the need to strengthen a European technological ecosystem capable of combining innovation, security and strategic autonomy. Similarly, various initiatives at European level, such as the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud, propose the creation of a more resilient European digital supply chain, in which infrastructure, data and services can be managed according to principles of greater control and interoperability. The role of major international providers is not being called into question, but the question arises as to how we can continue to benefit from their capacity for innovation without turning this relationship into a dependency that is difficult to reverse.
The issue concerns above all the hyperscalers – without overlooking, more generally, the major SaaS providers – and therefore companies such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), whose investment capacity and pivotal role in the development of artificial intelligence make them important and valuable partners for competitiveness in the digital market. The point, therefore, is not to have to choose between hyperscalers and national providers, but to build a balanced relationship with these entities, whilst preserving, over time, companies’ freedom to make decisions regarding the strategies for developing their own digital infrastructure. This new paradigm is known as ‘cloud de-risking’ and aims to reduce the risk arising from entrusting an organisation’s entire application portfolio to a single provider, with consequences such as greater exposure to vendor lock-in, reduced bargaining power, high migration costs and potential regulatory implications.
From multi-cloud to the Data Act: the goal of infrastructure autonomy
Reducing the risk of (cloud) concentration in the hands of a few players necessarily involves designing architectures capable of keeping options open. And it is this, not coincidentally, that is driving a growing number of organisations towards hybrid and multi-cloud models, in pursuit of functional architectural autonomy capable of placing each application in the most appropriate environment, without any one of them becoming the sole point of dependency for the entire organisation. Several factors underpin a model such as the one just described, foremost among them the adoption of open standards and technologies that minimise reliance on proprietary components as much as possible. Containers, open-source software and interoperable formats are playing an increasingly central role in businesses’ cloud strategies, reflecting the true objective of many organisations: namely, to ensure that reliance on hyperscalers’ services does not make it excessively complex and costly to change their infrastructure choices in the future. The challenge for businesses, therefore, is no longer merely about migrating between different cloud services, but about the ability to build truly interoperable architectures, deploying the design expertise and governance capabilities needed to manage the entire lifecycle of digital infrastructure.
Furthermore, the openness that companies require is also reflected in the revised European regulatory framework. With the entry into force of the Data Act on 12 September 2025, the European Union has introduced provisions designed to tangibly strengthen businesses’ right to transfer data and applications from one data processing service provider to another — thereby also including SaaS providers — by working towards the gradual elimination of switching costs (the complete elimination of which is scheduled for January 2027). And whilst legislation alone cannot automatically make an infrastructure designed without interoperability criteria portable, it is nevertheless understandable why the issue of digital sovereignty is gradually shifting from mere ownership to the governance of infrastructure. Being able to choose, integrate and replace different services without compromising operational continuity is now one of the key indicators of an organisation’s technological maturity, and collaboration with hyperscalers must also be viewed in this context.
Orchestrating the ecosystem to foster innovation
The approach taken by TIM Enterprise reflects this new requirement for a strategy that aims to enable organisations to utilise the best technologies (from hyperscalers and local providers) by building architectures in which innovation, sovereignty and resilience can coexist. With this in mind, TIM Enterprise acts as the orchestrator of the entire cloud ecosystem, designing hybrid and multi-cloud environments – including open-source stacks where possible – in which each workload is placed in the most appropriate location based on business variables, regulatory requirements and the criticality levels of data and applications. The most sensitive workloads, or those subject to specific regulatory constraints, can be managed on a sovereign, locally hosted infrastructure such as TIM’s, whilst applications requiring features specific to hyperscaler architectures can continue to ‘run’ on the hyperscalers’ systems. The value therefore lies not in choosing one platform over another, but in the ability to manage different environments as a single, coherent environment.
A distinctive feature of TIM Enterprise is also linked to the collaboration the company has developed with leading international operators, from Google Cloud to Microsoft and Oracle, forging partnerships that enable the integration of different technologies and services within architectures designed to ensure operational continuity, security and flexibility. In short, the underlying idea is to transform what appears to be a relationship of dependency into an ecosystem governed according to the organisation’s needs. Alongside integration capabilities, the issue of portability also plays a central role in TIM Enterprise’s offering. Designing infrastructure based on open standards from the outset, orchestration via Kubernetes (and thus automation of container lifecycle management) and documented interfaces effectively means exercising that freedom of choice, which is now further supported by the European regulatory framework.
As well as serving the market with its own cloud solutions or distributing third-party solutions, TIM Enterprise has the capability to manage integration and orchestration across heterogeneous environments, positioning itself as a technology partner capable of guiding the customer towards a single, integrated ecosystem. The ability to act as an independent third-party operator, in other words, is the starting point for designing solutions tailored to organisations’ actual needs and for preserving their decision-making autonomy over time. In TIM Enterprise’s view, collaboration with hyperscalers is not seen as an alternative to digital sovereignty, but as one of the tools through which to achieve it. In a context where resilience, interoperability and freedom of choice are becoming strategic factors in the competitiveness of businesses and public administrations, the value lies not merely in the availability of the most advanced cloud platform, but in the ability to manage the infrastructure according to one’s own priorities, with the understanding that control and innovation can go hand in hand.
