The digital sovereignty imperative: How Cohesity keeps you in control of your sensitive data

As regional regulations tighten and geopolitical conditions grow increasingly more complex, the concept of digital sovereignty—the ability of a nation or organization to maintain full control over its data, digital infrastructure, and technology, ensuring they operate under local laws, governance, and strategic interests—is gaining momentum.

Organizations today must ensure that all their data—whether primary or secondary, on-prem or cloud—is managed, protected and secured, while navigating regulation, threats, and data privacy concerns. The increasing adoption of cloud, SaaS, and AI at scale are also blurring the lines of data ownership and control. Sensitive data moves across both physical and digital borders, making maintaining control and sovereignty more critical—and more difficult—than ever before.

To address these concerns, leading cloud service providers have begun to offer sovereign clouds. This convergence of new realities has made one thing clear to IT and security teams: data protection strategies must be reevaluated to ensure a holistic approach to sovereignty.

The core pillars of digital sovereignty

Sovereignty isn’t just about where data lives—it’s about who controls it, who can access it, and how it’s protected. Sovereignty requirements vary widely across regions, industries, and even organizational risk-tolerance levels. These requirements can be categorized into the following categories:

• Data residency and jurisdiction ensures that data remains within national boundaries and handled according to local laws.
• Operational sovereignty places control requirements on operations, including various personnel restrictions such as location or citizenship for third-party operators.
• Infrastructure sovereignty requires physical and logical isolation from global public cloud infrastructure.
• Security and compliance call for adherence to regional data protection and residency standards, as well as mandate security controls such as locally managed encryption.
• Visibility and assurance demand clear insight into where data is stored and processed, with transparent audits and certifications reinforcing trust and accountability.

The hidden complexities of maintaining data sovereignty

Ensuring that data protection strategies comply with sovereignty requirements is anything but simple. Secondary data flows—like backups, logs, and metadata—can create compliance blind spots. Even when data stays local, extraterritorial jurisdiction laws can introduce complexity, compelling organizations to disclose data held overseas. In multicloud environments, a single misconfiguration or cross-region replication can breach sovereignty. Limited visibility into where every data copy resides further complicates control. Combined with insider risks, regional compliance differences, and rising costs, maintaining data sovereignty and full visibility remains a persistent challenge for enterprises.

Cohesity solutions: Sovereign by design

Cohesity has many options to meet our customer’s unique data sovereignty objectives, whether on-prem or in the cloud. We do this by delivering a unified, cyber resilient, AI-powered data platform—Cohesity Data Cloud—that is sovereign-by-design, making it easier to protect, manage, recover, and have visibility into data, while supporting compliance with data sovereignty requirements. Here's how Cohesity Data Cloud helps address key sovereignty requirements:

• Data residency and jurisdiction: Cohesity solutions such as DataProtect and FortKnox can be deployed in over 24 global cloud regions on leading cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Customers retain full control over access, usage, lifecycle, and retention policies, with all data copies (primary, secondary, replicated) confined to the same region. Additionally, console access, APIs, metadata, logs, visibility, and telemetry monitoring can also be isolated to the region to prevent data leakage beyond local jurisdiction. Cohesity’s sovereign-by-design architecture makes it easy to support sovereign cloud regions as they become available. We also offer the ultimate sovereign deployment—on-prem—including backup of cloud to on-prem for both Cohesity Data Cloud and FortKnox.
• Operational sovereignty: The Cohesity control/management plane can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises and can be managed exclusively by local personnel, supporting sovereign operations without external dependencies, ensuring complete operational autonomy. 
• Infrastructure sovereignty: Cohesity enables on-prem or cloud data to be stored in isolated environments, managed either by the customer in their own data centers or by CSPs/MSPs in their sovereign clouds, maintaining physical and logical separation from global infrastructures. Cohesity services are available across a growing list of major clouds and service providers to ensure compliance with regional requirements.
• Security and compliance: Cohesity services are built on a comprehensive zero-trust architecture, featuring immutability, RBAC, and granular access controls. Cohesity’s robust data masking, Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption, threat intelligence, and incident response capabilities also enhance cyber resilience in sovereign scenarios. Cohesity’s Data Security Alliance (DSA) enables collaboration with 25+ security ecosystem partners that help implement residency requirements and spot cross border violations. Cohesity also holds certifications for SOC2, ISO 27001, Common Criteria, DoDIN APL, FedRAMP/GovRAMP, etc. and is certified to be compatible with HIPAA. 
• Operational insights: With Cohesity, IT teams can provide detailed insights and reporting to streamline audits. Our integration with DSPM partners such as Cyera provides visibility to sensitive data flow and prevents it from being recovered to a location beyond the sovereign borders. Lastly, one of the use cases for Cohesity Gaia—our AI-powered conversational assistant—is to instantly flag data compliance deviations for sensitive and PII data with simple natural language queries, giving IT leaders clear visibility into where data is stored, processed, and transmitted.

Cohesity’s unified UI for data sources across on-prem, public cloud, sovereign cloud, and edge environments helps simplify management and visibility of sensitive data. Cohesity’s global presence in multiple cloud regions, partnerships with leading Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and our availability in regional cloud marketplaces simplify availability and procurement and make it an ideal solution for protecting data while staying compliant with data sovereignty mandates.

Cohesity is committed to helping enterprises increase cyber resilience and fulfill evolving sovereignty requirements, accelerating AI-driven innovation with trust and transparency. We will continue to work with customers and partners to adapt to requirements in this dynamic and evolving space.