A New Question For CIOs

Reflecting back on a high-level meeting with few colleagues in Spain last month – and recent conversations with technology leaders globally – one theme that has risen quickly on many board agendas is technology sovereignty. It is an emerging and challenging risk that directly affects global applications and cloud infrastructure, and its significance is growing rapidly in the new world order. Left unaddressed, it poses direct consequences for business continuity — threatening not only IT operations, but also financial performance, regulatory compliance, and customer trust.

With rising and unpredictable geopolitical tensions around the world, policy changes in a jurisdiction could limit or even halt cross-border cloud data flows. If that were to occur, global corporations with in-country operations tied into centralized infrastructure could face immediate operational disruption. This is a low-probability, but high-impact risk – one that warrants inclusion in strategic thinking around resilience and business continuity and should be on board agendas.

The “to-do” list for technology leaders was already daunting. The deck is already full and dominated by the pace of AI-driven innovation and the need to place substantial, and sometimes uncomfortable, bets on emerging technology. Equally, macroeconomic uncertainty and shifting trade policies are forcing a careful re-balancing – between driving cost optimization through global standardization – and building agility through more distributed infrastructure.

Now, an additional layer of complexity has surfaced. Policy changes linked to geopolitical events could render parts of today’s global application and infrastructure landscape unusable — overnight. Developing true alternatives quickly is extraordinarily difficult. Indeed, the technology market today offers few short-term answers, and establishing viable sovereign options or credible contingency plans requires both time and significant investment.

This reality pushes CIOs and their corporate boards toward a fundamental reassessment of technology models, enterprise architectures, and cloud strategies. A pragmatic way forward is a framework across three lenses:

– Risk Assessment & Exposure — map critical workloads and data dependencies that hinge on cross-border flows, identifying potential points of failure.

– Strategic Options — diversify providers and regions, strengthen hybrid capabilities, and ensure data portability to reduce lock-in.

– Governance & Partnerships — establish contingency playbooks, engage early with policy and regulatory bodies, and explore alliances with sovereign technology providers.

Hard to do today, challenging to execute — and yet, a risk that cannot be ignored.

This is on the agenda for one of our upcoming board meetings at the Executive Technology Board – as we tap into the collective intelligence of a curated group of Global CIO/CTO/CDO/CAIOs. Appreciate your perspectives on this.