Abstract

Based on digital sovereign cloud technology

States, societies, companies, and individuals have much to gain by leveraging modern digital cloud-based technology. Yet embracing technology without oversight over dependencies can easily result in situations where digital infrastructure is at the mercy of large foreign entities without any substantial possibility to exercise their control over it, without any possibility to reflect your values or to assert your regulation over it. Vendor lock-in is the opposite of digital sovereignty.

This document shows ways how to leverage open technology to gain and retain a high degree of digital sovereignty and thus increase the freedom to make deliberate decisions on using IT technology and data.

Summary

The following dimensions should be considered and implemented by states and administrative units to achieve a high degree of digital sovereignty:

• Running IT infrastructure on its own hardware or at trusted (national/regional) cloud providers

• Ensuring the availability of more than one technologically compatible provider

• Have resilient rule sets for digital processes, security, data protection, ...

• Using open source software to avoid all kinds of vendor lock-in and dependencies and to foster the ability to control and innovate with secure cloud technology

• Using mature open-source software for advanced requirements of governments

• Gaining competence in cloud operations (hardware- and software) and cloud-native development and knowledge to implement and operate cloud technology – open-source projects and communities can compensate for this step and help to build up local competence1. Having the independence in software is a huge step towards digital sovereignty, but having the knowledge and the ability to develop and operate these software stacks increases the independence substantially