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ZDNET Highlights
- As trust in American technology companies continues to decline, the importance of digital sovereignty is increasing.
- Red Hat’s open-source assessment toolkit helps you assess your digital sovereignty.
- You, not Red Hat, control your data and how you use the assessment.
In the past year, many governments and companies outside the US have decided that they cannot trust American tech companies. Therefore, digital sovereignty has become an important goal. However, as you can imagine, American companies are not happy about this, they are now helping European organizations achieve their digital sovereignty goals.
The first of these was a Linux and cloud-native computing powerhouse red hat. Late last year, Red Hat became the first US company to announce its own EU-specific digital sovereignty program, Red Hat Confirms Sovereign Support (RHCSS). This initiative guarantees that critical European IT operations will remain under EU control.
Also: Why even an American tech giant is now launching ‘sovereign support’ for Europe
Now, Red Hat is supporting this initiative with its open-source Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment Toolkit. The tool is designed to give governments and enterprises a concrete way to measure how much control they actually have over their data, infrastructure, and operations in the age of geopolitical cloud concerns.
this new Web-based, self-service surveys Walks organizations through 21 multiple-choice questions. Areas covered include data residency, encryption key control, disaster recovery planning for geopolitical events, and the ability to prevent sensitive data from crossing borders. The goal is to move digital sovereignty from a vague policy discussion to a measurable “sovereignty baseline” that IT and business leaders can act on.
An ‘open standard’ for assessing digital sovereignty
If you have all the information you need, it will take you 10 to 15 minutes to complete the survey.
Red Hat’s framework evaluates sovereignty maturity across seven domains: data sovereignty, technical sovereignty, operational sovereignty, assurance sovereignty, open source strategy, executive oversight, and managed services. At the end of the questionnaire, organizations receive a score mapped into four stages: foundation, developing, strategic and advanced. It also includes a roadmap of recommended next steps and research questions for stakeholders.
Also: Why open source can’t survive the rise of generic AI
In a notable twist to a space often dominated by opaque consulting playbooks, Red Hat is releasing both the tool and its underlying criteria under the Apache 2.0 license, positioning it as an “open standard” for assessing digital sovereignty. The program’s source code and functionality is on GitHub. Red Hat emphasizes that the framework is vendor-neutral and can be adapted, extended, or adapted by partners, competing vendors, and end users.
As Hans Roth, Red Hat’s senior vice president and general manager of EMEA, said in a statement, “For sovereignty to be real and attainable, the math behind the scenes must be accountable and open to inspection. Red Hat is providing transparent standards to give our clients confidence that their sovereignty strategy is exactly what it is.”
The worried Red Hat might be looking over your shoulder? Don’t be. The tool is designed so that all assessment data remains in the browser and is not sent back to Red Hat or any third party. If you want, you can simply download the code and run it on your server. Roth convincingly argues that this combination of open norms and local-only data management helps move the industry away from “blind trust” toward an auditable, verifiable model of sovereignty.
Also: Why France ditched Microsoft Teams and Zoom — and what’s replacing them
Of course, Red Hat hopes that you will turn to their services to achieve your digital sovereignty goals, but there is no requirement that you do so. You decide what to do with the analysis and whether you want to join one of the many other European-based governments, companies and organizations that are saying goodbye to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft or Google cloud services.
Keep in mind, all these US tech giants are also now offering their own digital sovereignty initiatives. The Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment Toolkit can help you decide whether these US offerings meet your needs.
