Sovereign Computing Initiaitve

For buyers

How to procure sovereign infrastructure with confidence

If your organisation needs digital infrastructure it can trust and control, the hard part is usually not deciding that you want sovereignty - it is specifying it, comparing suppliers honestly, and buying it without taking a leap of faith. The category exists to make that straightforward.

Start with your own position

Before you go to market, understand where you stand today: what you control, where you are exposed, and what matters most for your workloads. The buyer self-assessment gives you a tailored picture, and why sovereign computing sets out the case and the risks.

Specify what you actually need

Sovereign computing defines the foundation services a platform must provide - compute, storage and network, identity, zero-trust security, logging, high availability, and portable workloads. You can lift these straight into a requirements specification rather than describing them from scratch.

Ask for conformance, not claims

The word sovereign is easy to put on a brochure. Ask instead for conformance: a published, signed report against a shared checklist, and a pass on the Sovereignty Test - the simple requirement that you could change any of your providers without losing your data, your history, or your ability to operate.

Compare suppliers on the same terms

The Mark turns conformance into a tier you can compare across bids, alongside a short comparison sheet: assessed tier, last audit, the number of independent providers at each support level, and open exceptions. Provider plurality - more than one independent supplier for support - is the strongest signal that you are not locked in.

Make exit a requirement, not an afterthought

Build the exit into the contract: portable data formats, open interfaces between layers, and the right to change a support provider on ordinary notice. The ability to walk away is what gives you leverage, even if you never use it.

Where to start