Digital sovereignty as a promise of security and independence in an interconnected world
The topic of ‘digital sovereignty’ occupies a central place in current strategic discussions. How do you define this term for CANCOM and your clients?
Christian Neuhauser: CANCOM views digital sovereignty as a holistic undertaking. To this end, we combine technological, operational and data-related sovereignty in a seamless end-to-end solution – ranging from system integration and sovereign managed services to secure platforms for data collaboration, access control and Zero Trust Federation. This combination of breadth, depth of integration and vendor independence creates added value that is not available in this form anywhere else on the market.
That sounds like a complex requirement for the portfolio. How does CANCOM translate this into concrete offerings?
Christian Neuhauser: We want to offer our customers freedom of choice. We create a secure, flexible and vendor-neutral architecture for the exchange of data and workloads across locations, clouds and organisations. It can utilise quantum-based encryption, supports all cloud models and, through the use of open source, avoids potential dependencies on individual infrastructure providers.
However, our hybrid multi-cloud solutions are a key component in the context of data sovereignty. Here, for example, customers can keep business-critical data in a highly secure on-premises environment, whilst less critical workloads run in the cloud. Customers can flexibly combine different licences and hardware. What matters is not the storage location alone, but governance – in other words, who accesses what and what exit scenarios are available. And this is precisely where CANCOM provides an open-source-based Zero Trust Federation solution.
Many customers rely on the large, established hyperscalers. How does that fit in with the desire for sovereignty?
Latifur Rahman: That is an important point. Our analyses show that pure hyperscaler products are often not considered sovereign in the strict sense. However, sovereignty depends not only on the product itself, but also significantly on the approach taken to operating the IT infrastructure. This is where Confidential Computing Environments come into play. Workloads are executed in encrypted cluster environments, so that hyperscalers cannot access either the data or the keys – even if the infrastructure is hosted by a US hyperscaler. Our CANCOM Managed Services also operate independently of the location of the virtual machines.
The requirements are particularly high in the public sector and for critical infrastructure. How do you address these specific needs?
Latifur Rahman: CANCOM supports its customers in complying not only with GDPR-related regulations but also with the guidelines required by NIS/NIS2 and DORA. Our aim is to offer solutions that are ‘plug-and-start’, interoperable and compliant with EN standards, so that the customer does not have to deal with every detail of compliance themselves. Here, for example, we rely on the open-source solution ‘Grommunio’.
Certification to European standards is also firmly embedded in our strategy for the coming years. Together with our partners, we are able to offer our customers an alternative to the well-known US hyperscalers – a solution that is entirely European and ensures the necessary compliance.
Can you give a practical example of where digital sovereignty is already making a difference today?
Latifur Rahman: In the field of energy management, CANCOM is actively working on a comprehensive solution based on a single platform that guarantees data sovereignty and secure access, rather than operating individual solutions. This platform is being developed and operated in-house.
We are also seeing success in the international industrial context: RecAL is creating an ÖGUT-awarded ecosystem for sovereign data exchange. To this end, CANCOM provides an interoperable, CIS-certified, vendor-neutral and quantum-secure architecture that enables cloud- and data-agnostic, trustworthy data and service federation.
How is this issue changing the way you work with your customers?
Christian Neuhauser: The sales team is increasingly taking on an orchestrating role. Solutions must be individually tailored to specific needs. In their design and consultancy work, our architects consider not only the best technological fit among manufacturers, but also their headquarters and dependencies, the locations of the data centres used, the manufacturers’ price stability and a number of other factors.
We do not merely supply our customers with IT; through innovation workshops and clear governance models, we also aim to build genuine trust. Ultimately, digital sovereignty is a promise of security and independence in a connected world.