Why Data Sovereignty Is Becoming an Enterprise Architecture Question
ERP Today, Thursday, October 1st, 2026
Data sovereignty now covers control over operators, jurisdictions and dependencies, not just where data is stored, making it an architecture issue.
Data sovereignty was once treated mainly as a question of where data is located, but cloud and AI have broadened it as enterprise data now passes through retrieval systems, inference, logs, agents and third-party services.
The article distinguishes residency, meaning where data is stored, from sovereignty, which also covers who can access the data, which laws apply and how much control the customer keeps.
It compares approaches such as SAP's sovereign cloud options, Microsoft's EU Data Boundary and the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework, and argues that sovereignty requirements must be built into architecture decisions.