A global survey of 596 IT leaders published this week finds well over half (59%) work for organizations planning to prioritize hybrid cloud deployments for workloads requiring digital sovereignty.

Conducted by SUSE, the survey also finds 82% either rated digital sovereignty as extremely important for artificial intelligence (AI) model training (42%) or very important (42%) for AI model training. Overall, 61% said implementing AI is either a critical (24%) or major (37%) challenge.

Rhys Oxenham, vice president and general manager for AI at SUSE, said the survey results suggest there is a significant correlation between organizations that are looking to build AI models and the need for IT platforms that ensure sensitive data remains as isolated as possible.

Otherwise, there are concerns that data will wind up being used to train a general-purpose AI model accessed via a cloud service, which could result in that data inadvertently being surfaced in the output generated in response to a prompt, he noted.

Interest in digital sovereignty has risen sharply as tensions between nations have increased in recent months. Organizations in Europe especially are moving to set up IT environments that are not subject to any regulations such as the U.S. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, which could be used to seize IT equipment and compel providers of services to disclose data.

However, the degree to which IT organizations are embracing digital sovereignty appears to vary widely. Only 16% of IT leaders said they will rely purely on private cloud for such workloads. In comparison, slightly more than half of respondents (51%) said they plan to spend more on scaling deployments of sensitive workloads across multiple cloud environments.

Nearly half of IT leaders (46%) said they are also increasing their investment in enterprise support for open source software to run these workloads. Surprisingly, 31% of U.S. respondents said digital sovereignty is a top IT priority, with 50% identifying vendor lock-in as a critical or major issue.

In fact, many of the reasons IT organizations are investing in digital sovereignty platforms has as much to do with avoiding vendor lock-in as it does compliance mandates, noted Oxenham. The digital sovereignty challenge goes well beyond simply finding a way to store data in a local data center, he added

Potentially, the rise of digital sovereignty will have a profound impact on providers of cloud computing services, many of which may need to ensure that the workloads they are managing not only reside in a specific region but are also now managed by local IT teams. The open source community has in recent years been especially focused on making it possible to unify the management of control planes across hybrid cloud computing environments, said Oxenham.

The one thing that is certain is workloads are going to continue to become more distributed. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to efficiently manage them in a way that hopefully doesn’t increase the total cost of IT to the point where it far exceeds available budget resources.