Evaluating Digital Sovereignty Options  

• Digital sovereignty is increasingly important as enterprises face shifting legal and geopolitical environments.
• Microsoft has several options, but all involve serious trade-offs, and a complete solution is unavailable.
• Customers should adopt a disaster recovery mindset: make their own assessment of risks and focus on workloads critical for business continuity.

Enterprises are increasingly using the public cloud for mission-critical and data-sensitive workloads. But as customers face even more fragmented legal structures and nations appear likelier to use trade and commerce as tools of foreign policy, Microsoft, along with other vendors, is racing to fill the void with what it calls digital sovereignty solutions. But with an IT landscape that includes cloud and on-prem systems, SaaS and traditional software, and first- and third-party applications, IT leaders should not focus their efforts on achieving complete digital sovereignty but instead use a disaster recovery mindset. The key questions every organization must answer are as follows: