Quick answer up front: digital sovereignty means staying able to act if things go wrong — on location, law, technology, and control over your own data — instead of depending on a single foreign provider. And this is no longer a niche concern: 95 percent of German companies demand that Germany become more independent from the USA (Bitkom, 2025).
“Digital sovereignty” long sounded like a topic for ministries and large corporations. By now it’s on the agenda in the SME sector too, and not out of principle for its own sake.
Why Right Now
Three things are converging. First, the legal situation: the US CLOUD Act lets American authorities access data held by US providers, no matter where their servers stand — and since “Schrems II,” transferring personal data to the US has been an open, ongoing issue. Second, geopolitics: relying entirely on providers from a single country for critical infrastructure feels less like convenience right now and more like concentration risk. And third, simply the bill — cloud costs are rising, licensing models keep changing, and anyone who wants to switch pays extra because they’re stuck in lock-in.
Sovereignty Comes in Stages
It’s not a switch you flip, and it’s definitely not “back to your own data center.” It’s about stages, and you can gain ground on each one:
- Location — where is your data? EU hosting is the simplest first step.
- Law — who has access, under which jurisdiction?
- Technology — can you switch, or does a proprietary format keep you locked in?
- Control — do your data and your code actually belong to you in the end?
At a glance, the question that counts on each level:
| Level | The question that counts |
|---|---|
| Location | Where is the data physically stored? |
| Law | Which jurisdiction governs it? |
| Technology | Can I switch providers? |
| Control | Who can actually access it? |
Open source and EU hosting move you forward on every one of these levels, without having to rebuild half your company.
Nobody solves this in one go. It makes sense to tackle the most sensitive things first — email, files, passwords — and move them to European, ideally open solutions; for Microsoft 365 in particular, there are now GDPR-compliant alternatives that hold up in daily use. For new tools, it’s worth checking data portability and open formats before you commit. And it helps to be honest about what has to be sovereign and what’s allowed to just be convenient. Not everything is equally critical. If you want the control without administering servers yourself, you can have the operations handled as self-hosting as a service.
This has little to do with ideology. It’s about staying able to act when prices, contracts, or laws change — and right now, they’re changing pretty fast.
Want to know where your company is dependent and what could pragmatically change? That’s exactly what my consulting is for — let’s talk, an honest assessment, not a sales pitch.