Sovereignty in the digital world has emerged into one of the most discussed topics in Europe in the past years, and these discussions have recently materialized in the Franco-German initiated Gaia-X project, with 22 founding members, which incorporated over 200 international day 1 members at its official launch. With these layers, we will create a spectrum of solutions that enable scalable data spaces that will be critical for the digital transformation of the European economy. So to make it more concrete, in this article, we will look at digital sovereignty across three layers: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and software sovereignty. Digital sovereignty, however, still means many things to many people. Open and sovereign cloud technologies will provide the necessary transparency, control, and the highest levels of privacy and security that are required to fully leverage the potential of such data spaces. Data spaces provide organizations with additional capabilities to govern strict data usage rules over the whole life cycle of information sharing with others and enable new use cases and new business models where data can be securely shared among a defined set of collaborators and with clear and enforceable usage rights attached to create new value.

Therefore, sovereignty and control over data and its protection are paramount. However, cloud computing can only transform organizations, create innovation, or provide the ability to scale digital business models if there is trust in the cloud and if the data that is being generated, processed, exchanged, and stored in the cloud has the appropriate safeguards.

The cloud has changed the way we consume technology either as individual users or in a business context.

Dead space 3 concept art sovereign