Digital Sovereignty

You need to think about Digital Sovereignty. Unless you are in the U.S., of course. For everybody else, this is a very salient topic. Especially for us in Denmark these days.

This doesn’t mean that you have to free yourself from every American cloud provider. But it does mean there is a new item in your risk evaluation: Ending up on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blocklist.

Likelihood is Rare (1) for almost everybody. But if Impact is Catastrophic (5), you end up with a medium risk: Mitigate if cost-effective.

Switching costs almost always make it not cost-effective to transition a running system. But when you are building anything new, you don’t have switching costs. And an effective mitigation is to avoid using U.S. providers.