Sovereign cloud foundations: What should you expect from your cloud provider?

As sovereignty requirements evolve faster than the standards that govern them, how can organizations make future-proof decisions that serve their customers, protect their data and preserve their strategic autonomy?

Sovereignty should not be viewed as a product or a checkbox, but as a strategic posture—a forward-looking approach built on three foundational principles:

• Data protection by default: Granular control over data location, encryption and privacy, ensuring sensitive information is safeguarded across jurisdictions
• Operational transparency: Continuous, audit-ready visibility into compliance posture, access controls and system behavior across hybrid environments
• Portability by design: Seamless workload mobility across public, private and on-premises environments, enabling strategic flexibility and resilience.

These three principles must also comply with regulations. While regulatory harmonization is a work in progress, these are the minimum capabilities organizations should expect from their cloud provider today.

Sovereignty starts with data control—over data location, access and encryption. In an era where data fuels competitive advantage, control isn’t optional; it’s the foundation for trust and resilience. With the adoption of cloud services, the questions around data sovereignty and data residency become ever more important. So, what should we expect of the custodians we entrust data to?

• Encryption

Clients should have full control over their data—including the ability to encrypt it by using their own keys and determine who can access those keys. Consider that if a cloud provider can access your encryption keys and a government then directs it to turn over data, the provider might be obligated to decrypt the data.

A Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) concept is the optimal trust model for organizations to retain full control over access to their data regardless of where it is stored or processed. This model isn’t just a technical safeguard—it’s a foundation for trust.

• Residency and data control

True sovereignty begins with control, not just over where data resides, but who and how it is accessed, processed and protected. Organizations must be able to choose where their data is processed to meet jurisdictional privacy laws; the cloud provider is only the processor of the data. This choice ensures that organizations—not cloud providers—remain the ultimate custodians of their data.

The adoption of “as a service” technologies introduce a shared responsibility model between client and cloud provider for the delivery of digital services; in other words, a partnership. While there are many real-world definitions for what makes a successful partnership, communication and trust are always foundational tenets. So how do we build trust between all groups involved in the delivery of digital services?

• Visibility—Cloud provider to client

Cloud providers obtain infrastructure and service-level certifications, but these certifications do not automatically make an organization compliant. Clients require visibility across their workloads to ensure that dependencies and operational controls conform to their internal policies. Visibility also enables detection of unauthorized access where unapproved access might have legal consequences.

• Visibility—Client to regulator

Visibility is also the mechanism that provides evidence for regulators that operational controls conform to legal mandates. Administrative access at all levels of the application stack should be controlled, logged and available for audit. Compliance is another shared responsibility that varies by service model and regulation.

It is impossible to predict the future, but we can prepare for it. The digital world is constantly shaped by geopolitics, environmental disasters, pandemics or military conflicts. By designing applications and infrastructure to easily move workloads and data between different cloud environments and on-premises systems, one can ensure interoperability and flexibility.

Building sovereignty on solid ground

Sovereignty is not a checkbox—it’s a strategic capability. And like any capability, it must be built on a foundation of trust, transparency and technical assurance.

At IBM, we believe sovereignty demands more than compliance—it requires a strategic cloud architecture designed with three nonnegotiable capabilities:

• Encryption

IBM’s Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) technology enables encryption by giving clients exclusive control over encryption keys, backed by FIPS 140-2 Level 4—certified hardware—the highest assurance level for cryptographic protection. Even IBM cannot access these keys, making it technically impossible for IBM to decrypt client data under any circumstance.

• Operational transparency

IBM publishes its foundational service dependencies by location as well as providing a suite of capabilities to enable observability and is constantly enhancing our roadmaps to provide ever more transparency. Through continual monitoring of your entire application stack, IBM’s clients can simplify their compliance posture, can proactively mitigate security risks and can gain insights across hybrid multi-cloud environments.

• Portability

When selecting technologies to support critical infrastructure services, IBM recommends portability through open source technologies. Developing, modernizing and deploying applications onto a single platform that can be supported across any infrastructure unlocks access to the latest “as a service” technologies available in the market, while mitigating the risks of proprietary technologies. IBM’s commitment to open source and containers enables this key building block within a sovereign strategy.

These 3 technology capabilities must then be underpinned with regulatory alignment. IBM Cloud® meets global and industry compliance standards.

These capabilities are not optional features—they are foundational safeguards for organizations that want to retain control, build trust and remain resilient in an unpredictable world.

Because sovereignty isn’t just a technical specification—it’s a strategic choice. Every decision to embrace sovereignty carries an implicit promise: that your cloud architecture can uphold trust, resilience and compliance at scale. The question is whether your provider is truly built to keep that promise.

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