Digital sovereignty sounds great until you try ditching your suppliers
New research from Capgemini finds that most large organisations have given up on the idea of achieving full digital sovereignty, concluding that true technological independence from outside suppliers is unrealistic. Instead, two-thirds now favour what the consultancy terms "resilient interdependence" — accepting ongoing reliance on external technology providers while trying to limit the risk this poses to critical operations. The findings highlight just how deeply organisations remain entangled with third-party vendors despite years of political and industry rhetoric around sovereignty.
Capgemini surveyed 1,300 business and technology executives in April 2026, alongside a separate analysis of 866 organisations that found 86 percent had significant exposure to foreign or externally controlled supply chains, with only 14 percent having end-to-end visibility of their dependencies. Extracting themselves from these relationships is often difficult: 36 percent said switching away from a critical provider would take more than a year, and 10 percent said they had no viable alternative at all. Europe and the UK were more inclined to embrace interdependence than the US, AI emerged as the top sovereignty concern ahead of cloud and cybersecurity, and only 42 percent of organisations that had suffered a recent disruption had contingency plans in place.
- 59% of organisations say full digital sovereignty is unrealistic
- One in ten cannot replace a critical tech provider at all
- Only 42% with recent outages had contingency plans ready
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Digital sovereignty is the idea that a country, government or company should have full control over its own technology and data, rather than depending on outside suppliers such as foreign cloud computing firms or software providers. In recent years, politicians and businesses across Europe and elsewhere have pushed the idea strongly, often citing worries about being cut off from vital systems during conflicts, trade disputes or diplomatic fallouts.
Capgemini is a large consulting and technology firm that regularly surveys business leaders about how they manage risk in their supply chains and IT systems. Its research looks at how reliant companies are on outside vendors for things like cloud storage, software and artificial intelligence tools, and how easily they could switch providers or cope if a key supplier failed or withdrew service.
This matters because so much of modern business, from banking to healthcare to logistics, runs on technology built and maintained by a small number of large external providers, many of them based outside the country or region using them. If those suppliers cannot easily be replaced, disruptions, price rises or geopolitical tensions involving them could have serious knock-on effects for the organisations and customers who depend on them.