Digital sovereignty means strategic autonomy

Digital sovereignty does not necessarily mean keeping one’s data within national borders, by relying on a local alternative to the hyperscalers’ cloud services – and thus to the platforms offered by AWS, Google and Microsoft. In a debate that has in recent years been peppered with slogans relating to business plans and government strategies under the banner of technological independence, the distinction outlined above is probably one of the first to be made. For Agostino Santoni, Senior Vice President for Southern Europe at Cisco, the starting point should in fact be a different one. ‘I like to talk about strategic autonomy,’ the Italian executive explains to *Il Sole 24 Ore*, ‘and the main request we receive from our corporate clients is, in fact, to understand which business processes must remain sovereign and which, on the other hand, can utilise public cloud technologies.’

In the eyes of private companies and public authorities, this difference cannot be dismissed as trivial; it prompts a reflection that goes beyond the mere localisation of information and calls for a solution to the problem of operational control over one’s own data that is not merely infrastructural in nature.

Following the major waves of transformation driven by cloud migration, cybersecurity and energy sustainability, sovereignty has become the new requirement for digital infrastructure. What does this mean? According to Santoni, the first question that businesses and public administrations must ask themselves stems from the classification of business processes; consequently, they must determine which applications are truly critical and require direct control, and which, on the other hand, can benefit from the speed and scalability offered by major international providers.

There is no single answer, because the issue takes on a different significance for a bank, an energy provider or an airport operator than it does for a manufacturing company. “We must ensure that every organisation,” notes Cisco’s VP, “has the freedom to choose.” In other words, data residency is only one aspect of the issue, as equally important factors include who manages the infrastructure and which legal system exercises control in the event of disputes or incidents. “Sovereignty,” Santoni gets straight to the point, “is about technology, operations and jurisdiction.”

The debate on European digital sovereignty is inevitably intertwined with that of the dominance of non-European players in the fields of cloud services, semiconductors and artificial intelligence, but the key to achieving this objective should lie less in the ownership of platforms and more in the ability to govern and manage their use.