Digital sovereignty concerns have been around in the industry for a long time now, dating back to at least the introduction of the US PATRIOT Act following the 9/11 attacks. They've predominantly focussed on the risks associated with confidentiality, but is that really the key concern we should be worried about?

In this talk, we'll start with defining digital sovereignty, and then explore why the majority of organisations should be less concerned about data security (in the context of digital sovereignty), and more focussed how technology choices might impact data and service availability.

By walking through a typical organisation's tech stack from "edge to core", we'll identify areas of concern (some obvious and some less so), and explore what choices, if any, organisations have to mitigate risk. We'll also give some real-world examples of how events can shape policy:

• A walk through Project Sunflower, AWS’s response to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. We'll look at how Ukraine had to quickly adapt from both technology and policy perspectives, and explore just how close they came to losing key government systems of record, in part due to their prior approach regarding digital sovereignty.

• Look at how history is rhyming by exploring the impact that many companies felt from the recent US-Iran conflict, and how (for the first time) a hyperscale cloud provider lost an entire region due to kinetic action.

• We'll also cover a more recent example, when the US government invoked a national security law to shut-down Anthropic's new frontier LLM, Fable, to all users across the globe.

The session will finish on a (hopefully!) more optimistic note, by identifying the decisions and actions that organisations can take, right now, to start mitigating some of these risks.