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ZDNET's key takeaways
- As trust in US tech companies wanes, the importance of digital sovereignty grows.
- Red Hat's open-source evaluation toolkit helps you assess your digital sovereignty.
- You, not Red Hat, control your data and how you use the evaluation.
Over the past year, several governments and companies outside the US have decided they can't trust American tech companies. So, digital sovereignty has become an important goal. While American companies, as you can imagine, aren't happy about that, they're now helping European organizations to achieve their digital sovereignty goals.
One of the first of these was Linux and cloud-native computing powerhouse Red Hat. Late last year, Red Hat became the first US company to announce its own EU-specific digital sovereignty program, Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support (RHCSS). This initiative guarantees critical European IT operations remain under EU control.
Also: Why even a US tech giant is launching ‘sovereign support' for Europe now
Now, Red Hat is backing this initiative with its open-source Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment toolkit. This tool is designed to give governments and enterprises a concrete way to measure how much control they actually have over their data, infrastructure, and operations in an era of geopolitical cloud anxiety.
This new web-based, self-service survey walks organizations through 21 multiple-choice questions. Areas covered include data residency, encryption key control, disaster recovery planning for geopolitical events, and the ability to prevent sensitive data from crossing borders. The goal is to move digital sovereignty from vague policy talk to a measurable “sovereignty baseline” that IT and business leaders can act on.
An ‘open standard' for assessing digital sovereignty
If you have all the information you need at hand, it should take you 10 to 15 minutes to complete the survey.
Red Hat's framework evaluates sovereignty maturity across seven domains: data sovereignty, technical sovereignty, operational sovereignty, assurance sovereignty, open source strategy, executive oversight, and managed services. At the end of the questionnaire, organizations receive a score mapped to four stages: foundation, developing, strategic, and advanced. It also includes a roadmap of recommended next steps and research questions for stakeholders.
Also: Why open source may not survive the rise of generative AI
In a notable twist for a space often dominated by opaque consulting playbooks, Red Hat is releasing both the tool and its underlying criteria under the Apache 2.0 license, positioning it as an “open standard” for assessing digital sovereignty. The program's source code and methodology are on GitHub. Red Hat stresses that the framework is vendor-neutral and can be adopted, extended, or forked by partners, competing vendors, and end users alike.
As Hans Roth, Red Hat's senior VP and general manager for EMEA, said in a statement, “For sovereignty to be real and obtainable, the behind-the-scenes math must be accountable and open for inspection. Red Hat is providing the transparent standard to give our customers the confidence that their sovereign strategy is exactly that.”
Worried Red Hat might be looking over your shoulder? Don't be. The tool is designed so that all assessment data stays in the browser and is not sent back to Red Hat or any third party. If you want, you can simply download the code and run it on your own server. Roth convincingly argues that this combination of open criteria and local-only data handling helps move the industry away from “blind trust” toward an auditable, verifiable model of sovereignty.
Also: Why France just dumped Microsoft Teams and Zoom – and what's replacing them
Of course, Red Hat hopes you'll turn to their services to achieve your digital sovereignty goal, but there's no requirement that you do so. You decide what to do with the analysis and whether you want to join one of the many other European-based governments, companies, and organizations that are waving goodbye to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Google cloud services.
Mind you, all these US tech giants are also now offering their own digital sovereignty initiatives. The Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment toolkit can help you decide whether these US offerings meet your needs.
