IBM Sovereign Core overview

Introducing IBM Sovereign Core

Organizations today face increasing regulatory, legal, and operational requirements that prevent them from freely using global public clouds. Enterprises and governments must run workloads in-house or hosted by regional partners where they maintain data residency, security assurance, and operational sovereignty. Building and maintaining platforms like this can be complex, costly, and requires specialized expertise.

IBM Sovereign Core offers a fundamentally different approach to how digital sovereignty is implemented, governed, and proven. It addresses challenges by delivering a repeatable, open, and modular software stack that empowers organizations and local partners to deploy, operate, and manage applications within sovereign boundaries.

Key features

IBM Sovereign Core enables system owners and operators to set up, operate, and maintain AI-ready sovereign environments. It is built on IBM multicloud technologies and Red Hat OpenShift® providing a consistent foundation across hybrid infrastructure.

Direct authority - Operated by enterprise IT teams or partners

Organizations maintain full direct authority over operations and configuration, and all authentication, authorization, encryption keys, and access management remain within jurisdictional boundaries under customer control.

Hybrid cloud software platform with catalog

Deploy containerized applications and services in Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines. Pre-integrated services address the inter-related complexity of identity and role-based access controls, secrets management, logging, auditing, metering, monitoring, and provisioning. The catalog provides service offerings, which can be provisioned on-demand, including clusters, virtual machines, data stores, AI inferencing, and AI agents. Add additional service offerings to meet the needs of your lines of business.

Define, map, and validate compliance at scale

Choose from IBM Sovereign Core’s built-in library of catalogs, map from the extensive list of global standards and regulations to shared controls in the IBM Sovereign Control Framework (ISCF). You can reuse evidence across catalogs and continuously validate enforcement to quickly identify and close coverage gaps.

Combine automated monitoring of technical controls with human-reviewed evidence and attestations, to maintain accurate, up-to-date compliance postures and control effectiveness. Automatically generate, store, and manage reports within the sovereign boundary. Preserve end-to-end traceability and audit evidence without external dependencies or unnecessary data movement. Get a single, role-based view of posture, risk, and in-boundary evidence across tenants, environments, and workloads while supporting separation of duties for CISOs, IT administrators, auditors, and compliance officers.

Governed AI inferencing and agents

Secure, governed AI inferencing and agents within the enterprise boundary by providing managed access to models and agents with full control over data and infrastructure. Use prebuilt agents, write your own language custom agents, and deploy AI-powered applications for your lines of business.

Sovereignty and compliance management

IBM Sovereign Core enables you to operate any environment with continuous compliance to sovereign policies and regulations in your region. This capability allows you to maintain ongoing data privacy and sovereign compliance without vendor lock-in. You define and control the policies and sovereign regulations governing your data, operations, and technology.

Open, flexible, and portable

IBM Sovereign Core is built on an open-source foundation and an open architecture. This enables flexible component replacements with similar alternatives, while minimizing external dependencies and vendor lock-in.

Advancing digital transformation

IBM Sovereign Core enables enterprises to build customer trust and sovereign resilience while transforming and scaling their businesses with proven cloud technology patterns. For more information about digital sovereignty, see What is digital sovereignty.

Who is IBM Sovereign Core for?

System owners, including enterprise IT and IT service providers, use IBM Sovereign Core to provide cloud-native IT infrastructure for their customers within sovereign boundaries.

For system owners, IBM Sovereign Core provides the following capabilities.

Line of business users: Line of business owners receive isolated IT environments for running business workloads. Through a customized catalog, they are provided with on-demand and self-service access to predefined infrastructure. This predefined infrastructure includes clusters, virtual machines, and services such as data stores, AI inferencing, pre-built AI agents, and other services from a customized catalog. This capability enables efficient deployment and maintenance of applications and services with governed data, operational, and technology sovereignty, secure access, and lifecycle management control.