During past few weeks, we decided to rename our planned Forrester Landscape and Forrester Wave™ on digital sovereignty platforms to focus specifically on sovereign cloud platforms. This better reflects rapid changes in the general availability of sovereign tech products and services, and three main reasons brought us to make this decision:

  1. The sovereign tech landscape is more complex than it was one year ago. In 2024, the sovereign platforms market was still blurred, with very few comprehensive announcements from vendors and service providers and little actual choice of generally available products. That’s why, at the end of 2024, we planned Forrester’s sovereignty Landscape and Wave for 2025 with a broader scope in mind than just cloud. But newly announced tariffs, the anticipated retaliation measures, and increasing global geopolitical volatility have resulted in an evolved sovereign technology landscape with more products and services available, specifically in the cloud space.
  2. Each tech market is developing its own sovereign solutions. From software to networks to service providers and beyond, digital sovereignty is now a theme that pervades every area of the enterprise IT stack. This is driving the creation of new sovereign solutions and services parallel to those already available in the different tech markets, resulting in the evolution of a sort of “sovereign twins”: solutions and services that mirror generic ones while embedding sovereign guardrails and features. As a result, we have recently observed the clearest and broadest advancements in the sovereign cloud space.
  3. Global clients want to know their sovereign cloud options. New risks — such as foreign administrations being empowered to push the kill switch — have raised concerns at global organizations about their dependence on foreign vendors. Our clients increasingly realize that when not properly managed, these dependencies could put them out of business. Therefore, they want to know their alternatives, and we’ve seen the greatest uptick in demand with regards to a specific overview of the sovereign cloud solutions available.

For all these reasons, we are moving ahead with new titles for these upcoming Landscapes and Waves to start analyzing just one of these sovereign tech markets while leaving space for more accurate analysis of other such markets in the future. If you want to hear more about this, be sure to check out my session “Digital Sovereignty Drives Cloud Choices In Times Of Geopolitical Volatility” at the upcoming Technology & Innovation Summit EMEA in October. In the session we’ll discuss how digital sovereignty impacts cloud services and which sovereign cloud services options are available for European cloud leaders. 

For now: Welcome to the era of sovereign cloud platforms.