Companies and public authorities are increasingly striving for digital sovereignty. As public administration works with highly sensitive data, the German government’s digital strategy calls for authorities to have full sovereignty over their IT. Companies, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly aware that they need to be digitally independent in order to protect their intellectual property, secure competitive advantages and not restrict their ability to innovate.
According to ownCloud, public authorities and companies can already achieve complete digital sovereignty in the software stack. This state is achieved when their software applications guarantee independence on three decisive levels:
1. Data sovereignty. Data sovereign organizations are always autonomous with regard to their own data and do not have to fear unwanted access. This risk exists in particular when companies or public authorities do not operate IT systems themselves and do not host data themselves, but instead use external IT service providers and cloud services.
In these cases, it must be ensured that no unauthorized parties gain access, that the data is stored and processed in accordance with applicable law and that this right can be effectively enforced in case of doubt.
2. Operational sovereignty. Organizations must be independent of platforms when operating software. They should be free to decide where they want to operate an application: be it in their own data center, as a managed service with an IT service provider of their choice or in a public cloud. But the software itself must also guarantee independence. Companies and public authorities should be able to replace an application with an alternative solution at any time if necessary. To this end, the software must support open standards that enable all types of data to be transferred freely and without modification to other systems.
3. Technical sovereignty. Companies and public authorities should not have to blindly trust that software is working properly, but should be able to verify this themselves. This is only the case if they have full transparency about the source code of a software, i.e. if they use open source or shared source software.
Open source code enables organizations to convince themselves that a software does not contain any backdoors through which data can be leaked to third parties unnoticed. Their investments are also protected. If the provider disappears from the market, they can continue to develop the software independently.
Holger Dyroff, Co-Founder, COO and Managing Director of ownCloud.
“If you apply this model, it quickly becomes clear that digital sovereignty is not possible with the cloud platforms of the major US players. They do not guarantee independence on any of the three levels,” explains Holger Dyroff, Co-Founder, COO and Managing Director of ownCloud.
“Companies can only achieve one hundred percent digital sovereignty with solutions from the open source community – and this option is de facto open to them today. There is now a wide range of enterprise-grade open source applications that can easily compete with hyperscaler services in terms of user-friendliness and functionality.”
Learn how ownCloud ensures digital sovereignty for your sensitive data.
Read the original press release (German)