SUSE today revealed it is looking to expand the ecosystem of certified partners committed to enabling organizations to achieve their digital sovereignty goals.

Announced at the SUSECON 2026 conference, a Sovereignty Specialization added to the SUSE One Partners program will make it simpler to identify IT services providers that have the expertise needed to, for example, localize data within the bounds of a specific geographic region.

An IT service provider to qualify for the SUSE Sovereignty Specialization must have a ready-to-deploy blueprint that defines a standardized architecture for building compliant sovereign cloud and AI environments that has been validated by SUSE. Managed service providers (MSPs) must have usage metering tools that enable them to transparently track uptime instances.

Under the program, enterprise-grade support will be delivered by SUSE to ensure reliability, security and operational continuity to provide a single, trusted point of accountability.

Andreas Prins, leader of the global initiative on digital sovereignty at SUSE, said this specialization extends an ongoing effort to provide organizations with access to an ecosystem of IT services partners that have the expertise needed to turn operational autonomy ambitions into an IT reality. The overall goal is to provide a 100% auditable IT stack based on an open source platform that protects data from being subject to foreign regulations, said Prins.

While much of the interest in digital sovereignty is emanating from organizations that need to comply with European Union mandates, digital sovereignty requirements have become a global phenomenon, noted Prins. In fact, a survey of 309 IT leaders in France, Germany, India, Japan and the U.S. published today by SUSE finds that nearly all (98%) are prioritizing digital sovereignty initiatives to reduce their dependency on IT platforms and services provided by vendors that are subject to, for example, U.S. or Chinese regulations.

However, only (52%) are actively taking steps to achieve that goal and even fewer (45%) included sovereignty in recent requests for proposals (RFPs), with 42% ultimately selecting vendors based on it. A total of 41% said they only act on sovereignty when required by customers or regulation.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), however, may drive more organizations around the globe to pursue some form of digital sovereignty to ensure their data is not widely shared with providers of large language models (LLMs). Nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) said control over model training and AI provenance will be the top driver of digital resilience in the next five years.

Other top priorities for achieving resilience include cybersecurity and threat detection (63%) and multi-cloud or hybrid diversification (52%), followed closely by continuous monitoring (44%) and backup and recovery (45%).

Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering for The Futurum Group, said sovereignty concerns have moved past data residency to full-stack control over runtime ownership, operations, and execution location. SUSE is betting enterprises will evaluate platforms by whether every layer meets that standard, he added. Sovereignty now scopes every architectural choice and buying decision, from AI to Linux, noted Ashley.

Regardless of the motivation, it’s clear that more organizations have become more sensitive to the risks that become inherent when relying on IT platforms and services provided by vendors that are subject to the laws and regulations of a foreign country. The challenge now is finding a way to attain a level of IT independence while at the same time finding ways to keep the total cost of IT from spiraling out of control.