Freedom of choice: a prerequisite and outcome of digital sovereignty

Right now, digital sovereignty is top of mind for companies across Europe. Our newly published 'The State of Digital Sovereignty in the Nordics' report offers a thought-provoking snapshot of where the Nordics stand. One of the main findings is a change in outlook: awareness has risen sharply and sovereignty has evolved from a compliance requirement into a leadership priority.

Here at Vivicta, we’ve made it our business to help customers turn sovereignty into an organizational capability that gives them greater control, freedom of choice and freedom of action.

This blog focuses on freedom of choice. It explains why every organization needs it, why now is a good time to think about it, and how we at Vivicta can help you attain it. I’ve also put together a checklist: seven practical steps to achieving freedom of choice. You can find it at the end of this blog.

The power to say no

What is freedom of choice? In short, it’s about being aware of your risks and having options ready to manage these risks before they materialize.

Money always makes for a compelling argument, so let’s start there. When it comes to money, freedom of choice often boils down to one thing: being able to say no.

Take, for example, American tech giants. On the whole, I’m a huge fan. Their tech is highly advanced, easy to use, arguably the best in the world. But if competitors come up with something even better – or my favourite tech providers suddenly decide they want to make unprecedented profit – I like knowing I can walk away and still do my job.

What happens in your business if a key vendor raises its prices by 15%? Or 20%? Maybe you can’t afford the markup. But if exit is virtually impossible, you don’t have the luxury of making that choice. Your only option is to pay more.

Pricing pitfalls aren’t the only reason you need freedom of choice. The volatile geopolitics of the 2020s and major legislative proposals to reduce Europe’s structural reliance on non-EU technology are formidable drivers.

The European Commission is now explicitly pursuing technological sovereignty. As this agenda develops, European organizations may well face new requirements designed to reduce strategic dependencies. It’s best to act now, instead of waiting until your hand is forced.

We can help you keep credible options open

Freedom of choice is not a question of eradicating non-EU technology. The objective isn’t complete isolation from hyperscalers, but taking practical measures to keep your options open: ensuring you can select the right platform for each workload, change providers when necessary and continue critical operations even under disruption.

To achieve this, you need to know where your dependencies are, maintain credible alternatives and retain control of the capabilities that matter most to your business. In essence, you have to take a good hard pre-emptive look at what would happen if you found yourself boxed in – and then take all the necessary steps to ensure this never occurs.

Once you’ve worked out where freedom of choice is pivotal for your business, it’s time to make smart decisions about redundancy. For many organizations, hybrid solutions will be on the table. They provide an excellent pathway to creating freedom of choice. But they do inevitably add complexity.

That’s where we come in. We know how to manage that complexity for you. And we can also give you a plan B: we have a sovereign cloud in our own data centres, managed by us. If you want to build a parallel system, we can deliver the entire system with management.

Below, you’ll find the checklist I made for practical steps to achieving freedom of choice. If you want support – or just to discuss your options, call me. I’d be happy to help you assess your situation.

Seven practical steps to achieving freedom of choice:

1. Define sovereignty objectives: identify the business risks, regulatory obligations and critical services that require greater control; assign executive ownership; and set measurable targets for data location, provider concentration, recovery, portability and exit readiness.
2. Classify data, workloads and dependencies: determine which information, applications and AI use cases need national, Nordic, European or standard cloud environments, and map the providers, technologies, data flows and jurisdictions on which each critical service depends.
3. Reduce architectural lock-in: define portability requirements before procurement; favour modular applications, open interfaces and interoperable data formats; keep infrastructure and deployment automation independent of a single platform where practical; and test that critical workloads and data can be moved to an alternative environment.
4. Retain operational authority: maintain independent access to critical skills, identities, encryption keys, security and monitoring data, configuration records, source code or deployment artefacts, recovery procedures and the decision rights needed to operate critical services without relying solely on an individual provider.
5. Test continuity and exit options: maintain documented exit plans for critical providers; validate backups and recovery at least annually; rehearse supplier substitution and workload migration against defined recovery objectives; and address the findings jointly with critical technology partners.
6. Use procurement and contracts to preserve freedom of choice. Require transparent data-location and subcontractor commitments, timely access to operational and security data, usable data-export formats, transition assistance, predictable egress costs, audit rights, service-continuity obligations and clear termination provisions. Evaluate concentration risk across the provider portfolio, not only the suitability of each individual supplier.
7. Track progress through a small set of sovereignty indicators, such as the share of critical workloads with an approved alternative platform, the percentage of critical data covered by tested export and recovery procedures, provider concentration, portability-test success, recovery performance and the number of unresolved exit-plan dependencies. Review these measures regularly at executive level and include sovereignty in investment, architecture and supplier-governance decisions.