From the war in Ukraine, to the Middle East, and escalating tensions in the South China Sea, the threat of conflict is forcing governments and businesses to confront an uncomfortable truth that digital systems are not immune to geopolitical pressure.
At London Tech Week recently UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the way that war is being fought “has changed profoundly,” adding that technology and AI are now “hard wired” into national defense. It was a stark reminder that IT infrastructure management must now be viewed through a security lens and that businesses need to re-evaluate data management technologies and practices to ensure they are not left out in the cold.
Easier said than done. According to recent research from Civo, 83% of UK IT leaders say geopolitics threatens their ability to control data and 61% view sovereignty as a strategic priority, yet only 35% know exactly where their data resides. That’s not just a compliance gap. It’s a sign that infrastructure, policy and strategy are still out of sync.
Senior Director and General Manager UK&I Sales at Nutanix.
Data sovereignty used to be a conversation for the policy teams and legal departments. Not anymore. Regulatory fragmentation, rising cyber risk, and increasingly complex data ecosystems are forcing organizations to treat sovereignty as a live operational concern. Whether it’s knowing who can access your AI training data or ensuring a healthcare provider meets national residency requirements, data sovereignty now defines what businesses can and cannot do.
The EU Data Act, the UK’s evolving position (the UK is no longer bound by the EU Data Act but it remains closely aligned in practice to preserve data adequacy and ensure the continued free flow of data with the EU), and the increasing stringency of critical infrastructure policies, are starting to shape what enterprise resilience should look like.
As Lord Ricketts noted in the House of Lords in October last year, “the safe and effective exchange of data underpins our trade and economic links with the EU and co-operation between our law-enforcement bodies.” That trust depends on demonstrating a clear and enforceable approach to data control.
For many, public cloud services have created a false sense of flexibility. Moving fast is not the same as moving safely. Data localization, jurisdictional control, and security policy alignment are now critical to long-term strategy, not barriers to short-term scale. So where does that leave enterprise IT? Essentially, it leaves us with a choice – design for agility with control, or face disruption when the rules change.
Modern infrastructure needs to be sovereignty-aware
Sovereignty-aware infrastructure isn’t about isolation. It’s about knowing where your data is, who can access it, how it moves, and what policies govern it at each stage. That means visibility, auditability, and the ability to adjust without rebuilding every time a new compliance rule appears.
A hybrid multicloud approach gives organizations the flexibility while keeping data governance central. It’s not about locking into one cloud provider or building everything on-prem. It’s about policy-driven control across environments, managing workloads through the context of data.
For example, a financial services firm may need to keep customer transaction data within UK borders, but still wants to run analytics in the cloud. With the right architecture, workloads can move, but sensitive data stays governed. That’s sovereignty in practice, not theory.
Of course, generative AI introduces a new layer of complexity. Training models on private data, deploying inference at the edge, or simply sharing prompts between locations adds pressure to already stretched governance models.
And while many organizations have rushed to build or adopt AI tools, few have aligned these efforts with data residency or compliance. Sovereignty isn’t just about storage anymore. It’s about compute, access patterns, and understanding how third-party models interact with your data.
Building with sovereignty in mind
Edge and sovereign cloud capabilities will be essential here. But they only work if infrastructure teams are given the mandate and support to build with sovereignty in mind. That means cross-functional collaboration between legal, compliance, and IT. It also means choosing platforms that support location-aware deployment and policy enforcement from day one.
According to Nutanix’s recent public sector sovereignty research, 94% of public sector organizations are already using GenAI tools, yet 92% say they could do more to secure those workloads, and 81% say their infrastructure needs improvement to support sovereignty requirements. That says everything you need to know about the challenges facing both public and private organizations. Complexity has clouded judgement and capability.
And yes, customers want to know where their data is, of course they do. Partners also want to understand how it’s being used. With regulators increasingly expecting transparency, not just tick-box compliance, sovereignty, in this context, becomes a proxy for trust.
This is particularly important in sectors like healthcare, education, and government. But it’s not limited to them. Any business operating in or across regulated markets needs to demonstrate control. Not because it’s a checkbox, but because it’s now fundamental to continuity and reputation.
So where do you go from here?
First, get clear on where your data is and what laws apply. That’s not always simple. Next, review your infrastructure to see if it can support location-aware controls, hybrid deployment, and detailed auditing.
Then, consider where GenAI and future workloads are headed. Are you prepared to scale them without breaching sovereignty requirements? Can your teams adapt quickly as policies change?
Finally, treat sovereignty not as a constraint, but as a core part of your design strategy. The organizations that do this well won’t just be compliant, they’ll be more resilient, more transparent, and better prepared for what comes next.
Because in a world where data moves faster than policy, the ability to stay in control isn’t just good governance, it’s good business. And when geopolitics forces the issue, it might just be the nudge needed to get sovereignty right.
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