Digital sovereignty: taking back control

Digital sovereignty is not a slogan: it is the very concrete question of who controls our data, our infrastructures and our dependencies. As organisations entrust their systems to the cloud, to a handful of large providers and to globalised software chains, they gain in convenience but sometimes lose in visibility: over where data is located, the law that applies to it, and their ability to change provider or to keep operating if access is cut off. Taking back control does not mean bringing everything back home or turning inward; it means choosing your dependencies with full knowledge of the facts. It goes through simple but often dodged questions: where is our data, which laws is it subject to, what would happen in the event of an outage or pressure from a third-party state, and would we know how to reverse a critical service? Cybersurveillance adds one more dimension: protecting your communications and those of exposed individuals becomes as much a matter of security as of freedom. This guide brings together the analyses on sovereignty, cloud and cybersurveillance to help leaders and decision-makers weigh clearly between efficiency, resilience and autonomy.