🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the limitations of traditional cloud sovereignty, which relies on geographic location and struggles to manage governance challenges arising from geopolitical tensions, legal uncertainties, and expanding service boundaries. The authors propose Sovereign 2.0, a novel model that redefines sovereignty as evidence-based control rather than physical infrastructure placement. This framework establishes a three-layer control structure—governance, operational, and technical—integrating post-quantum-ready cryptographic mechanisms such as TLS and key escrow. It enables enforceable service governance across federated environments through governance authority, privileged access management, data lifecycle controls, observability, and incident response. The model introduces a pioneering three-tier risk assurance system covering both steady-state and crisis scenarios, delivering verifiable sovereignty throughout the cloud service lifecycle and significantly enhancing system resilience and recoverability, with profound implications for cloud architecture design, procurement strategies, and security governance.
📝 Abstract
Cloud sovereignty can no longer be defined by data residency or infrastructure location alone. Under conditions of geopolitical disruption, legal exposure, and expanding service boundaries, sovereignty must be understood as enforceable control over how digital services are governed, operated, and recovered.
This paper introduces Sovereign 2.0, a control-plane-centric model that extends sovereignty beyond localisation to include governance authority, privileged access, cryptographic trust, data lifecycle control, observability, and incident response across federated environments. We define management sovereignty as the sovereign ability to govern, operate, evidence, and recover services regardless of underlying infrastructure dependencies.
To operationalise this model, we propose a three-layer risk-assurance framework spanning governance, operational, and technical controls, enabling sovereign outcomes to be specified and continuously evidenced under both steady-state and crisis conditions. We further position post-quantum-ready cryptographic control, particularly TLS and key custody, as foundational to long-term sovereign trust.
These contributions reframe sovereignty as an evidence-backed control system rather than a property of location, with implications for cloud architecture, procurement, and resilience design.