Oliver Brack
Global Head Cloud & DevOps
As data and digital services become the lifeblood of business, cloud control has moved from being primarily an IT concern to a boardroom discussion. European regulators and company boards alike are redefining what sovereignty means in the cloud era, forcing organisations to rethink how they manage critical data, systems, and infrastructure.
Against a backdrop of shifting trade policies, geopolitical instability, and tightening regulations, it’s easy for sovereignty decisions to feel urgent. But reacting out of fear can lead to unnecessary complexity or missed opportunities.
In this article, we’ll take an objective look at what sovereign cloud really means for European organisations and discuss practical ways to balance control, compliance, and innovation without overcomplicating your infrastructure unnecessarily.
What is a sovereign cloud: Zühlke's perspective
Digital sovereignty is best understood not as a single destination, but as a spectrum of levels of control. A sovereign cloud solution provides organisations with a degree of authority over their data and digital services, ensuring compliance with regional or national regulations and digital sovereignty requirements.
A higher level of control can be delivered in different ways. For example, through hyperscaler infrastructure located in Europe and fully operated under an isolated European legal entity, like with the help of AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Or, hyperscaler infrastructure can be integrated into an organisation’s own data centre, shielded from external access, like the Azure Stack Edge.
A common misconception is that adopting a sovereign cloud automatically means moving away from U.S.-based providers. In reality, sovereignty is about degrees of control, not geography alone. It’s the ability to define policies, enforce compliance, and safeguard sensitive data wherever it resides.
From fear to risk: a smarter path to cloud sovereignty
At Zühlke, we don’t view cloud sovereignty as an all-or-nothing decision. It’s a spectrum. Different workloads and data categories require different levels of control. For some highly sensitive or regulated data, stronger sovereignty could be essential. For other workloads, overly restrictive controls can slow operations, limit scalability, introduce additional costs, or block access to innovations like artificial intelligence.
Moving from a fear-based to a risk-based approach means assessing actual exposure rather than reacting to headlines, geopolitical uncertainty, or regulatory pressure.
Sovereignty decisions should be objective, measured, and aligned with business priorities. Once the level of required control is defined, the technical solution and implementation naturally follow, rather than letting fear drive reactive, overengineered architectures.
By approaching cloud sovereignty this way, you can protect critical assets while still unlocking the scalability, speed, and innovation that modern cloud platforms provide.
3-step action plan to assess your sovereign cloud needs
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cloud sovereignty. The right strategy depends on your business priorities, data sensitivity, and technical landscape. With this in mind, we recommend starting with an objective assessment to move beyond political or emotional drivers and make sovereignty decisions based on real risk. Here’s a framework that we typically use with clients:
1. Map critical business functions to IT systems:
Start by identifying the processes that are essential to your organisation’s mission and mapping them to the applications and infrastructure that support them.
This exercise highlights where sovereignty exposure exists, whether through the risk of foreign access, regulatory non-compliance, or potential service disruption. It also ensures that sovereignty efforts focus on what truly matters.
2. Analyse data sensitivity:
Next, you need to classify your data along a spectrum, from low-sensitivity information to highly regulated assets such as patient records, financial transactions, or sensitive public-sector data. By aligning sovereignty requirements to the sensitivity of each workload, you can safeguard critical information without over-engineering less critical ones.
This balance is especially crucial in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, and the public sector. From our experience in these environments, as long as you factor sovereignty and compliance into your cloud strategy from the outset, you can meet regulatory requirements while keeping operations efficient and scalable.
3. Evaluate trade-offs and constraints:
Assess where higher levels of sovereignty are truly worth the cost. Greater control can come at the expense of scalability, speed, or access to advanced services like AI and platform-as-a-service offerings. Weighing these losses carefully against your security and compliance needs is essential.
If you’re considering moving parts of your infrastructure on-premises, factor in the technical burden. Applications that are tightly integrated with hyperscaler services may require significant refactoring to run elsewhere.
Lastly, consider operational complexity. Multi-cloud or sovereign architectures add operational complexity, requiring skills and resources that many organisations underestimate.
Through these three steps, you’ll gain a clear picture of your organisation’s sovereignty requirements and the desired level of control over your data and digital services. The next step is to translate this understanding into a concrete cloud solution and migration roadmap – a topic we’ll explore further in future articles.
Making sovereignty work for your organisation
Geopolitical risks and evolving regulations are real, but they don’t have to dictate your cloud strategy. The key is to make sovereignty decisions based on measured risk and ensure that business strategy, not fear, guide your infrastructure decisions.
At Zühlke, we can help you move from theory to practice with a structured risk assessment to identify where sovereignty truly matters. Our cloud experts make trade-offs explicit, so you can see exactly how different decisions will impact security, compliance, speed, and budget.
Looking for practical guidance and a clear path forward?
Our complimentary Digital Sovereignty Accelerator Session can help cut through the noise. In just one hour, you’ll gain valuable insights on your organisation’s risks, opportunities, and concrete next steps. All tailored to your specific situation and completely vendor-neutral.
What you get:
- Quick discovery: a short questionnaire to capture your needs and priorities.
- Expert exchange: a focused 60-minute session with our cloud, security, and digital sovereignty specialists.
- Neutral perspective: independent insights, free from vendor bias.
- Actionable summary: a summary of findings and recommendations for your next move.
The session is designed for organisations that are unsure how to balance sovereignty with cloud adoption and usage, for teams already on their journey seeking validation from an expert sounding board, and for companies with existing strategies who want a neutral review.
We meet you where you are, whether still on-premises, mid-migration, fully cloud-based, or on a hybrid setup. Benefit from our expertise in highly regulated industries and learn how others tackle digital sovereignty challenges. Fill out the form and start the journey today.
