Digital Sovereignty: Opportunity or Illusion?

“Digital sovereignty” has become a recurring mantra in every conference and strategic document. Yet behind the rhetoric, the question is simple:

This issue is critical for Italy and Europe. Security, transparency, and competitiveness are not buzzwords—they are conditions for survival in an uncertain and unstable geopolitical landscape. And yet, there is a real risk that frameworks such as the Cloud Sovereignty Framework and Sovereign Cloud Tenders become marketing exercises rather than true opportunities to drive European industry forward.

Through the Digital Sovereignty Framework, the European Commission has outlined the core pillars of digital sovereignty, which can be summarized into three key areas:

The European market is a mosaic of solutions. On one side are global hyperscalers, offering feature-rich, scalable, and flexible platforms, backed by certifications, massive investment capacity, and a strong, difficult-to-challenge market position. On the other side are local and European providers, ensuring greater control, transparency, and compliance with EU regulations, but with more limited investment capacity and service portfolios.

This diversity is not a weakness—it is the foundation of a resilient and value-driven strategy. Achieving full digital sovereignty in the short term may not be realistic, but we can build an ecosystem where users—institutions, businesses, and citizens—can make informed and conscious choices.

Today, Europe’s efforts to define digital sovereignty indicators are still largely focused on technological aspects: data, management, and infrastructure.

The real challenge is to ensure that technological compliance does not become an exclusive advantage for large non-European players. What is needed is a systemic vision—one that includes risk assessment, control over supply chains, skills, and taxation, alongside technological factors. In other words, both technical capabilities and territorial impact must be considered.

Digital sovereignty should therefore be understood as the combination of technology, supply chain, and impact. This approach allows each organization to assess risks and opportunities more effectively, measuring trade-offs: which data and services require the highest level of control—even at the expense of advanced features—and which can benefit from the capabilities of global providers. It also means identifying which assets must ensure resilience in extreme scenarios, such as internet outages or the temporary unavailability of a global hyperscaler—risks that already occur today due to cyberattacks or operational failures.
Ultimately, digital sovereignty is not just about legal headquarters in Europe or technological choices—it is about economic and social impact.

Public procurement is a powerful lever to guide European digital growth and innovation. It will only be effective if it rewards transparent governance and locally rooted expertise, capable of generating social, economic, and financial value.

This represents a unique opportunity to support and scale centers of excellence—similar to what we see in other sectors of Made in Italy and Made in Europe. Public procurement can become the catalyst for a strategy that strengthens territorial value creation.

For Deda, digital sovereignty is not just about technological independence—it is a real opportunity to innovate and create value. The starting point is simple: trust is built on transparency—knowing where data resides, who manages it, and which competencies are involved.

Our investments in co-innovation labs with research institutions enable us to design open and resilient architectures, as well as build transparent and traceable data and model supply chains (data & model lineage). This approach ensures strong governance, with management models that maintain local control while reducing dependency on external providers.

The development of Intacture, an underground data center in Trentino created through a fully Italian public-private partnership, is another key pillar. It is not just a modern, sustainable, and low-impact data center—it is an open ecosystem that enables advanced AI services, strengthening the region’s role in the European digital landscape.

For Public Administration and regulated sectors, knowing where data is stored and who processes it is essential to ensure security and compliance. With Deda Next, we deliver Italian-built, secure, and regulation-compliant application solutions, designed to be interoperable and sustainable.

Deda is uniquely positioned to manage the entire technology value chain—from secure and sustainable physical infrastructure, to federated computing platforms, to specialized applications for Public Administration and critical sectors. This capability allows us to deliver services that support digital sovereignty through technology, expertise, and governance.