By Hans Roth, senior vice president and general manager, EMEA, Red Hat

Digital sovereignty is the ultimate strategic lever for innovation. It propels organisations beyond compliance into true operational freedom where you, not your cloud provider, dictates your business continuity.

Red Hat believes that sovereignty shouldn't be a wall but a foundation for the freedom to choose where and how you run your workloads. To accelerate this push towards sovereign independence, we are introducing the Red Hat Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment tool.

Global regulations have raised the stakes for operational resilience and data jurisdictional control. But for many organisations, the path to independence is obscured by ‘black box’ stacks, limited optionality, and fragmented data silos.

The path towards a sovereign foundation starts by understanding where your organisation currently sits, and this is where the Red Hat Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment tool comes into play.

Establishing a baseline for control: The readiness assessment

You cannot govern an IT estate you don’t fully understand. This self-service assessment provides a clear, objective baseline of your organisation’s digital control across seven critical domains:

1. Data Sovereignty: The physical and jurisdictional control of your data throughout its lifecycle.
2. Technical Sovereignty: The composition of the underlying software stack.
3. Operational Sovereignty: Your team's capacity to maintain and recover systems without external reliance.
4. Assurance Sovereignty: The ability to independently audit and validate the integrity of your systems.
5. Open Source Awareness: The use of community-driven innovation to neutralise vendor lock-in.
6. Executive Oversight: The alignment of sovereignty goals with leadership-level governance.
7. Managed Services: The flexibility of cloud deployments across specific regions and datacenters.

Understanding the results: Red Hat’s sovereignty maturity scale

Upon completion, the tool provides a maturity score that categorises your current capabilities into four stages:

• Foundation: The early stages of identifying sovereignty requirements.
• Developing: Actively building capabilities and addressing initial gaps.
• Strategic: Strong, repeatable capabilities exist across most domains.
• Advanced: Broad, proactive control is exercised over its entire digital estate.