Digital sovereignty in practice: Reducing SaaS dependencies

A clarification up front, because the debate often tips into the fundamental. The goal is not to banish every cloud service and pull everything onto your own servers. For most mid-sized companies that would be more expensive, slower and riskier than the dependency it is meant to avoid. Software as a service has good reasons: less operation, faster updates, predictable costs.

The useful measure is a different one. It does not ask "own or external" but "what does the exit cost us, and how quickly could it happen?". A service you can get back out of within two weeks with your data is a calculable dependency. A service that holds your data in a closed format and without which you cannot work for a week is a concentration risk, no matter how well it runs today.

The most effective measure costs the least before signing the contract and the most later, when it has been neglected. For every critical service, clarify three things before you introduce it: do we get all of our data back out, in which format, and have we actually tested the export once?

The last point is the one where it fails. Many vendors promise an export, and it then delivers an unusable file missing the links, or a format no other system can read. An export you have not once played back into a target system is a promise, not an exit strategy. Test it once in the first year of operation, while the pressure is low. Record the result. This one exercise noticeably shifts the balance of power at the next price round.

For every service that processes your data, three answers should exist in writing. Where is the data located geographically? Who can access it technically, including at the vendor? And is it encrypted so that access without your key comes to nothing?

This is not a pure compliance exercise for the data protection officer. In an emergency, data control decides whether you can switch and whether a vendor change or an insolvency catches you off guard. Data that sits in the EU, whose access is regulated and which you keep encrypted is not only friendlier to data protection. It is also easier to rescue when a vendor fails. Where especially sensitive data is processed, the storage location is worth treating as its own selection criterion, as our knowledge article on choosing hosting works through for the technical side.

Open source is not an end in itself and not a question of conviction. It is a tool against exactly one danger: that switching costs become so high that a switch is practically impossible. With open-source software the code and the data model are yours in case of doubt. You can change the vendor without changing the system, or take over operation yourself.

That does not pay off everywhere. For a standard office suite the proprietary solution is often the sensible choice. But for the systems that make up your business and hold your most valuable data, meaning website, customer management or an increasingly AI-supported knowledge base, the question of an open foundation is justified. Here it decides your negotiating position for the next ten years. The same applies to AI: the economically important question is who owns the integration layer between the model and your systems, a point our article Make or buy for AI solutions explores in depth.

The fourth lever is the most targeted. Not everything has to sit in the EU, but the sensitive part should. Personal data, trade secrets and anything under special supervision belong on infrastructure subject to a clear legal framework that is known to you. Today that is no longer a sacrifice of comfort: European vendors and EU regions of the large cloud platforms are mature and competitive for most use cases.

What matters is the legally clean framing, so that nobody sells false security here. A server location in the EU is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. What also matters is which law the vendor is subject to as a company and who can access the data. This question belongs in the contract and with your data protection officer, not in a marketing slide.

Sovereignty does not come from a decision of principle but from a list. Write down your three most critical services, meaning the ones without which you could not work for a week. Note a single number per service: how many weeks would you need to switch to another vendor with your data? Just estimating this number shows where your biggest concentration risk sits.

If you want to put this list into a robust order and set up a real exit strategy for the most critical service, we sort that out together in a Future Check. Prefer to talk directly? You can reach us via the contact page.