A procurement lead can answer the board's first sovereignty question in about a minute: yes, we have discussed it, the minutes are filed. The second question, which single supplier failing would stop the company shipping, takes a quarter and an outside firm. Only 14% of organisations told Capgemini they have end-to-end visibility into the dependencies across their broader technology ecosystem [5], which leaves roughly seven in eight debating an exposure at board level that they cannot enumerate [6]. What teams tell themselves is that sovereignty is a hosting decision: choose the region and sign the data processing addendum. What they do is renew. More than a third, 36%, say moving away from a critical technology provider would take upwards of twelve months [7], and one in ten say they have no viable alternative provider whatsoever [8]. That last tenth has nothing left to negotiate with. Against those numbers, "resilient interdependence" is an accurate label rather than the climbdown it sounds like. Two-thirds now use it to mean selective control over the technologies that matter most, with partnerships for everything else [3]. It travels unevenly: 75% in Europe take that definition against half in the US [4]. So does the purpose. In the UK 56% and in continental Europe 52% call sovereignty risk mitigation and resilience-building, against 41% in Asia-Pacific [9], while in the US 52% see it primarily through a compliance lens and 40% as a resilience tool [10]. The preparedness data runs the other way, and the mechanism is worth naming. Compliance framing produces artefacts that somebody audits, which is why compliance-driven programmes end up with a runbook while concern on its own usually stays undocumented. Among organisations that recently suffered operational disruptions, 42% have contingency plans, rising to almost two-thirds in the US and falling to a little over a third in Europe and Asia-Pacific [11], even though European and Asian firms report significantly greater concern about keeping critical operations running through geopolitical disruption than American or British ones [19]. Then the price. Just under half of executives say they are willing to pay a digital sovereignty premium, which the survey puts at 23% on average [12]. On EUR 1m of annual spend that is EUR 230,000 a year for capability the organisation already has [13]. Four in five name operational resilience against geopolitical volatility as the leading driver of these programmes [14], and three quarters put AI at the front of the queue [15], which is also the layer where duplicating a stack costs the most and where the 23% gets tested first. The programmes cluster in aerospace and defence and in transportation, the same list Europe's own tech sovereignty package targets [21]. Mistral's EUR 3bn raise at a valuation above EUR 21bn, with the European Commission's Scaleup Europe Fund among the co-leads, is the supply side betting the premium gets paid [16]. Karine Brunet, Capgemini's chief operations and delivery officer, put the conclusion as knowing rather than owning: complete independence is rarely achievable in interconnected ecosystems, so the goal is a clear understanding of technology dependencies sufficient to regain control and flexibility over risk [17]. It is a defensible position, and as The Next Web observed, it is also a description of consultancy work [18]. The usable version is a 2x2 for whoever owns the vendor list. First axis: do you know what breaks if this supplier goes away. Second axis: could you be off it inside twelve months. Mapped and substitutable is where sovereignty language is safe to use in a board paper. Mapped and not substitutable is where a 23% premium buys something real, a second source or an escrowed exit. Unmapped and substitutable is a fortnight of work for one competent engineer.
