Digital sovereignty sounds great until you try ditching your suppliers

After years of governments and tech vendors banging the digital sovereignty drum, most large organizations have concluded that true technological independence is beyond their reach. That's according to new research from Capgemini, which found that 59 percent of organizations regard complete digital sovereignty as unrealistic. Instead, two-thirds define it in terms of what the consultancy calls "resilient interdependence" – accepting continued reliance on outside technology providers while trying to ensure those dependencies do not threaten critical operations. It's a pragmatic conclusion, though perhaps not surprising given how thoroughly tangled those dependencies have become. Digital sovereignty broadly refers to an organization's ability to retain control over its data, infrastructure, software, and critical technology operations, including where they are hosted and whose laws govern them. Capgemini surveyed 1,300 business and technology executives in April 2026, covering companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and government departments with budgets above $1 billion. Its separate Digital Sovereignty Index, based on an analysis of 866 organizations, found that 86 percent had significant exposure to foreign or externally controlled supply chains. Across the research, just 14 percent reported end-to-end visibility into dependencies throughout their wider technology ecosystems. Getting out of those relationships isn't necessarily straightforward either. Some 36 percent said moving away from a critical technology provider would take more than a year, while another 10 percent said they had no viable alternative. That leaves organizations trying to work out how much independence they actually need, rather than rebuilding their entire technology stacks closer to home. European respondents appeared particularly receptive to that compromise. Three-quarters defined sovereignty in terms of resilient interdependence, compared with half of respondents in the US. The UK also tended to view sovereignty through the lens of risk: 56 percent of British respondents primarily associated it with resilience and risk mitigation. This doesn't mean the subject has disappeared from the corporate agenda: 93 percent of respondents said it had been discussed at board level, and 44 percent ranked it among their board's top priorities. AI is adding another dependency for those boards to worry about. Three-quarters of organizations identified AI as a key focus of their sovereignty efforts, ahead of cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, and software. Money presents another problem. Just under half said they would pay extra for sovereign technology. Among those willing to do so, the acceptable premium averaged 23 percent. Perhaps the more uncomfortable finding concerns what happens when those carefully accepted dependencies actually fail. Among organizations that had recently suffered an operational disruption, just 42 percent had contingency plans in place. Almost two-thirds of US organizations were prepared, compared with slightly more than a third in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Capgemini argues the answer isn't complete technological independence, but deciding which systems and capabilities matter enough to keep under tighter control, while building alternatives and recovery plans around everything else. Given that one in 10 organizations cannot currently replace a critical provider at all, this may be less a philosophical embrace of interdependence than an acknowledgment of where the exits actually are. ®