A recent AWS outage wreaked havoc on global IT systems, as a DNS error turned into widespread disruptions for businesses across a range of sectors. But this wasn’t an isolated incident.
Last year’s CrowdStrike bug triggered one of the largest Microsoft outages in recent memory, affecting eight and a half million computers worldwide. Microsoft itself even suffered yet another significant outage just a few weeks ago.
These events aren’t anomalies; they’re symptoms of a deeper, systemic issue: an over-reliance on US hyperscalers.
CEO and founder of emma, a Cloud Management Platform.
When control planes and operational tooling are hosted outside the EU, failures abroad turn into outages at home. European organizations often find themselves waiting for fixes from US-based systems they do not control. This reliance makes every global incident a European incident.
To strengthen resilience, European companies need a strategy built on reducing dependency on any single provider and regaining operational autonomy. But resilience is only part of the story. Digital sovereignty is equally critical – and increasingly a financial necessity.
By distributing workloads across both US hyperscalers and European sovereign cloud providers, organizations can strike a balance between innovation, operational control, and regulatory trust. This is no longer about ideology; it’s about competitiveness, cost efficiency, and protecting what matters most.
The hidden costs of blind spots
Sovereignty in the cloud is often dismissed as a legal formality, but this overlooks a growing set of operational inefficiencies that quietly erode performance and value.
Many organizations often assume that they can move data if they need to, but the reality is that costly egress fees can make it expensive for organizations to switch providers or easily repatriate and migrate data.
This creates a dependency on a single hyperscaler and makes cross-border compliance not just an expensive challenge, but technically and operationally difficult to execute due to differing compliance rules and the required skills. Organizations that delay or avoid migration can often be left exposed to outages and regulatory risk.
Another example is latency from remote control planes. When key orchestration systems are hosted in distant jurisdictions (as was the case with AWS during its recent outage), responsiveness suffers. In regulated industries like finance or healthcare, where real-time control is essential, this latency introduces unacceptable risk.
Non-portable services compound the problem. These proprietary tools lock businesses into specific cloud environments, making it costly and complex to migrate or scale. Over time, this lack of flexibility erodes performance and agility, leaving organizations vulnerable to outages and expensive cost of vendor lock-in.
These aren’t just technical shortcomings; they are sovereignty gaps. When critical systems sit outside your jurisdiction, and portability is limited, organizations can lose control over operational resilience.
And while these risks rarely show up in dashboards or financial reports, their impact gradually builds over time. They undermine resilience, inflate cloud spending, and limit strategic flexibility.
Making invisible risks measurable
To address these hidden risks, enterprises must move beyond reactive compliance. They need full visibility into their cloud environments and must begin treating sovereignty as a measurable business metric. This begins with quantifying the financial impact of non-compliance.
This includes fines, reputational damage, the cost of remediation and opportunity costs when teams are forced to shift their attention from innovation to remediation. These figures must be integrated into strategic planning rather than being treated as an afterthought.
If your organization is looking to adopt AI or is already leveraging it throughout the business, the cost of delayed AI adoption caused by jurisdictional constraints also needs to be considered.
These constraints often stem from sovereignty requirements that dictate where data can be stored, processed, and accessed, limiting the ability to train models on diverse datasets or deploy intelligent services at scale. In today’s competitive landscape, delays to innovation can mean falling behind.
Operational exposure is another critical metric. When telemetry and control systems operate outside trusted borders, they introduce vulnerabilities that compromise both security and regulatory alignment. These sovereignty-related risks must be tracked and factored into cloud strategy decisions.
By making these hidden costs visible, organizations can finally align cloud strategy with business goals, regulatory expectations, and customer trust – rather than reacting to outages or compliance failures after they occur.
Sovereign strategic transformation
The ability to measure sovereignty gaps transforms them from abstract concerns into actionable insights that directly reduce hidden costs and improve operations.
Once these inefficiencies are quantified, businesses gain leverage – they can negotiate better pricing and secure data residency guarantees with cloud providers that reflect jurisdictional realities and operational needs.
This visibility also allows for ongoing smarter workload placements, helping to optimize cloud economics and reduce unnecessary overhead.
Just as importantly, sovereignty builds trust. Customers and regulators alike want transparency and by demonstrating a proactive approach to sovereignty, businesses can strengthen relationships and differentiate themselves in crowded markets.
Europe’s complex regulatory landscape is often seen as a constraint, but with the right mindset and metrics, it becomes a strategic advantage. Organizations that embrace sovereignty set themselves up to turn compliance into innovation and regulation into resilience.
Turning sovereignty into a strategic differentiator
Businesses must embrace sovereignty as a strategic lever for growth and a core pillar of digital transformation, with sovereignty gaps being viewed as measurable business risks. The shift from reactive compliance to proactive governance must be a turning point.
The cloud value lost from downtime and hyperscaler reliance is a massive roadblock to cloud innovation and resilience. In this new era, organizations that reduce this reliance by leading with sovereignty earn themselves control, transparency, and strategic foresight, but above all, a competitive edge.
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