New research explores how confidential computing can enable organisations to retain control of sensitive data while leveraging shared cloud infrastructure.
As European policymakers and business leaders debate how to reduce reliance on US technology without damaging competitiveness, a new whitepaper from Arqit and Intel suggests the sovereignty debate may be framed the wrong way.
Rather than focusing solely on where infrastructure sits, the paper argues the more important question is who ultimately controls access to the data and applications running on it.
The white paper examines how confidential computing environments can allow organisations to retain sovereign control over sensitive workloads even when operating on shared cloud infrastructure. In practice, this could allow governments, enterprises and critical infrastructure providers to maintain operational control of their data while continuing to benefit from hyperscale cloud innovation.
Michael Murphy, Deputy CTO, Arqit, said: “Europe’s digital sovereignty debate is increasingly being framed as a stark choice – either remain dependent on hyperscalers or rebuild an entirely sovereign technology stack from the ground up. But that’s a false dilemma. Hyperscale platforms power a huge part of the global digital economy because they deliver scale, resilience and speed of innovation that organisations depend on. So, trying to untangle decades of integration with those ecosystems overnight would be enormously disruptive.
“At the same time, recent geopolitical tensions have made it clear that when critical digital infrastructure sits under another country’s jurisdiction, governments and enterprises may not have the level of control they assume. That’s why the sovereignty debate needs to shift away from who owns the infrastructure and towards how access to the data is restricted.
“Cryptographic technologies like confidential computing, combined with sovereign key control, allow organisations to retain full control over keys, policies and workloads even when running on shared or hyperscale infrastructure. In other words, the infrastructure can remain global, but data remains sovereign. If Europe wants to strengthen digital sovereignty without undermining competitiveness, the focus should be on securing control of data wherever it happens to be, not attempting to rebuild the entire digital stack from scratch.”
