Digital Sovereignty as a Design Requirement
InfoWorld, Tuesday, October 27th, 2026
David Linthicum argues digital sovereignty covers who controls data, keys, operations and jurisdiction, and must be designed into cloud architecture.
In an InfoWorld opinion piece, David Linthicum argues digital sovereignty has become a practical enterprise cloud problem that goes beyond where data sits to who controls data, infrastructure, encryption keys, administrators, support, and legal jurisdiction.
A workload can meet residency rules yet fail if management services, support staff, telemetry, backups, or keys sit outside the required boundary.
He cautions against treating sovereignty as only a legal checkbox or a technical setting, and says many enterprises lack a full map of sensitive data.
He argues AI pipelines, including embeddings and prompt logs, belong inside the sovereignty boundary, and recommends classifying workloads by sensitivity, regulation, and geopolitical risk.