Digital sovereignty: identify, assess and reduce dependencies

Hardly any business process runs without digital systems today, and many of them sit with a handful of providers, most of them U.S.-based. As long as everything works, nobody notices. It becomes noticeable when a provider raises prices, drops features or discontinues a service, or when a client asks where your data is and who can access it. Digital sovereignty means being able to answer those questions before they are asked.

What digital sovereignty means

Sovereignty does not mean isolation. You do not have to wall off your IT or give up cloud services. What it means is the freedom to choose technologies and partners so that no one-sided dependencies arise that constrain how you act.

The degree of sovereignty you need is not a blanket decision for the whole organization. It follows per use case from protection needs and criticality: a marketing system may be set up differently from the core application your business runs on.

Three dimensions

We look at sovereignty across three dimensions and check concrete points in each:

• Data: Where your data sits, who can access it and which jurisdiction the provider is subject to. We check storage locations, access paths, encryption and processing on behalf under the GDPR.
• Technology: Whether your systems rest on open standards and interfaces or whether there is vendor lock-in, meaning a dependency that makes switching providers practically impossible or disproportionately expensive. We assess architecture, data formats and export paths.
• Ability to act: Whether operations continue when a provider fails or changes its terms. We check exit capability and recovery as part of business continuity management. For entities under NIS-2 this is not optional: Article 21(2) requires supply chain security and business continuity.

How we work

1. 1
   Inventory
   Capture dependencies per process: providers, contracts, data flows.
2. 2
   Assessment
   Derive the sovereignty need per use case from protection needs.
3. 3
   Target picture
   Develop a hybrid target picture with alternatives and an exit plan.
4. 4
   Transition
   Test the target environment, secure the switch, build competence.

How we support you

• Dependency and data flow analysis: For each critical service we capture provider, jurisdiction, data class, criticality and contract status. The result is an assessed dependency map, the basis for all further decisions.
• Architecture reviews and threat modeling for the hybrid target picture and for new initiatives, from AI services to connected production, before contracts are signed and systems are built.
• Cloud security: configuration and permission review of your cloud environments, assessed against benchmarks such as BSI C5.
• Penetration tests of the target environment so that the switch does not lower your level of protection.
• Exit plan and business continuity management: exit scenarios per service, recovery planning and regular review.
• ISMS as the framework that keeps provider dependencies in your risk management permanently rather than in a one-off project.
• Training on cloud security and security experts on demand, so that competence grows in-house and decisions do not end up with the provider.

Do you process classified information? Separate requirements apply, see classified-information protection and VS-NfD.

We sell no hardware or software and do not audit what we ourselves advised. The decision on providers and target picture stays with you. We deliver the assessment, the target picture and the technical evidence, but we do not replace a legal review of your provider contracts.