Why digital sovereignty matters for 8ra
For 8ra, digital sovereignty is a policy objective and a practical requirement that directly shapes how digital infrastructure and services are designed, built and operated in Europe.
Growing geopolitical and economic uncertainties and increasing dependencies on non-European technology stacks have exposed structural risks for industrial value chains, critical infrastructures and public administration. For the 8ra Initiative, these developments underline the need for digital systems that remain controllable, interoperable and resilient under European legal and operational conditions.
The 8ra Initiative addresses this challenge by focusing on how digital sovereignty can be implemented in practice – across cloud and edge environments, and across multiple providers and countries.
Understanding digital sovereignty in the 8ra context
Within the 8ra Initiative, digital sovereignty is understood as the ability of European stakeholders to retain effective control and self-determined choices over their digital environments, even when systems are distributed, federated and operated across organisational and national boundaries.
Rather than treating sovereignty as a fixed label, 8ra approaches it as a set of verifiable capabilities that vary depending on the use case. For example, the sovereignty requirements for industrial workloads, industry and public-sector data or edge-based applications differ in scope and criticality.
From the 8ra perspective, digital sovereignty rests on four mutually reinforcing dimensions:
- Data sovereignty: data location, access and processing are transparent and controllable by the user.
- Technological sovereignty: architectures and interfaces are based on open standards and avoid structural dependencies.
- Operational sovereignty: services remain functional, manageable and auditable even in cases of provider change, disruption or crisis.
- Legal sovereignty: digital services operate under European jurisdiction and comply with European law, including data protection and data access rules.
These dimensions are essential. They directly inform the architecture and governance of the Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum developed within the 8ra Initiative.
The role of the Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum
The Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum is the technical core of 8ra’s contribution to digital sovereignty. It enables cloud and edge resources from different providers to be combined into a federated, interoperable environment.
This architecture reduces structural dependencies by design. Workloads can be deployed, migrated and operated across providers and locations, based on transparent rules and shared interfaces. This increases resilience, flexibility and choice for users.
IPCEI-CIS provides the framework and funding to realise this vision at scale. It supports cross-border deployments, reference architectures and operational cooperation between providers, ensuring that sovereignty is embedded not only in design documents, but in running infrastructure.
Concrete projects within 8ra, such as EdgeConnect, demonstrate how this works in practice. They establish connected cloud-edge testbeds and orchestration mechanisms that enable secure operations, workload portability and auditability across organisational boundaries.
At the same time, industrial partners including SAP, Bosch, Siemens and Airbus contribute real-world requirements, ensuring that interoperability and sovereignty are aligned with complex enterprise and industrial use cases.
Making digital sovereignty measurable
For 8ra, digital sovereignty must be assessable and comparable. Only measurable criteria allow users, administrations and businesses to make informed decisions.
Frameworks such as the Cloud Sovereignty Framework are therefore an important step. They translate objectives into operational requirements that can be evaluated. However, their effectiveness depends on how they are applied.
8ra advocates for an implementation that combines such frameworks with open standards, interoperable architectures and proportionate certification pathways. In particular, small and medium-sized providers must be able to participate without disproportionate barriers.
By embedding these principles into the Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum, 8ra contributes to a form of digital sovereignty that is pragmatic, scalable and anchored in real-world deployments – strengthening the stakeholders’ capacity to innovate, compete and act independently in the digital domain.