Red Hat today made available an assessment tool that makes it simpler for organizations to determine to what degree they are ready to achieve actual digital sovereignty.
Jeff Picozzi, manager for product marketing for industries and edge for Red Hat, said the Red Hat Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment tool, via a series of responses to questions, is designed to enable IT teams to surface which of four levels of sovereignty they have already achieved and then determine what needs to be done to reach the next level.
Armed with those insights, it then becomes easier for IT teams to distinguish between, for example, assessing the level of data sovereignty they have compared to operational sovereignty that typically requires an entire IT team to be located within a specific geography, noted Picozzi.
The tool Red Hat is now making available is designed to make it easier for organizations to create a current baseline for assessing their digital sovereignty requirements, he added.
The degree to which any one organization can achieve IT sovereignty is naturally going to vary and, in most cases, may not even be completely achievable. However, it’s clear there are plenty of opportunities to reduce dependencies on providers of IT infrastructure and applications that might be subject to rules and requirements imposed by a specific government.
Many organizations in Europe, for example, are looking to reduce dependencies on IT services provided by vendors that are subject to the U.S. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act that dictates any organization using IT infrastructure made by a U.S. company could, at least in theory, have its IT platforms seized.
Additionally, many organizations are looking for ways to ensure that sensitive data doesn’t wind up being used to train an external artificial intelligence (AI) model that then makes the data available to anyone able to craft a prompt to surface it.
Of course, sovereignty, much like freedom, usually comes at a cost. Many organizations, in addition to assessing their technical capabilities, will also need to determine to what degree acquiring and deploying, for example, more applications in an on-premises IT environment versus a cloud computing environment might increase or decrease costs.
Some IT teams may need to rearchitect some elements of their applications using microservices to reduce their dependency on a specific cloud computing service provider.
Finally, any potential impact to application performance will also need to be determined as data is stored in a specific region because government mandates don’t suspend the laws of physics.
Red Hat as an arm of IBM is already working closely with its parent company to deliver a set of managed IT services for digital sovereignty and expects to be providing similar services via other IT services partners, noted Picozzi.
Ultimately, however, each organization will need to determine what level of sovereignty they need to achieve in a way that, hopefully, doesn’t far exceed the usually limited budget resources that have been made available to achieve that goal.
