The EU has become increasingly dependent on US and Chinese providers for cloud computing and artificial intelligence, prompting concerns around sovereignty and the storage and movement of content within cloud infrastructures.
Fears that foreign legislation, such as the US CLOUD Act, could allow non-European governments to access sensitive data have accelerated initiatives to build European-owned infrastructure and led the European Commission to establish its Cloud Sovereignty Framework. The framework evaluates providers across three foundational objectives:
Legal and jurisdictional sovereignty: data must be insulated from foreign legal claims, ensuring local courts maintain ultimate jurisdiction.
Operational control: Systems must be independently operated, with administrative and support access remaining within the intended ecosystem.
Data and AI sovereignty: Organisations must retain control over their data assets, preventing unauthorised use and reducing dependency on external providers.
While these discussions are particularly prominent in Europe, the underlying concerns are increasingly relevant worldwide. Media companies are asking important questions about who controls their data, where content resides, and how easily they can move operations if business, regulatory, or operational requirements change.
Technical challenges
Cloud platforms have delivered tremendous benefits, but they can also create dependencies that are difficult to reverse.
Many application vendors have taken advantage of proprietary cloud services such as orchestration, resource management, transcoding, and transport. This accelerates migration to the cloud, but it can also make applications heavily dependent on services that may not exist – or may function differently – on other platforms. The result is that moving an application between cloud providers can become far more complex than originally anticipated.
Other software vendors utilise virtual machine-based architectures. While these can improve portability, they often fail to take full advantage of cloud scalability. Because virtual machines are typically always running and require additional software layers, they can be less efficient and more costly to operate.
Storage introduces another consideration. Most cloud providers offer robust redundancy by distributing content across multiple servers and regions. This improves resilience but can reduce visibility into where content is physically stored and how redundancy is managed, limiting customer control over data location.
Financial challenges
Lock-in is not solely a technical issue. Many cloud pricing models were designed around traditional compute workloads, where large volumes of data are uploaded, processed, and returned as relatively small result files.
Media workflows are fundamentally different.
Large volumes of content are uploaded, processed, stored, and repeatedly retrieved or distributed. As a result, storage and egress costs become a much larger factor. This creates an asymmetrical pricing challenge. While ingesting content is often inexpensive, storing and retrieving it can become costly. For media organisations, these costs can create a significant barrier to moving operations between providers.
In discussions with one major cloud vendor, the response was straightforward: media represents only a small percentage of their overall business, and there is little incentive to redesign pricing structures around media-specific requirements.
The independence checklist
Maintaining data sovereignty requires careful planning and technology choices.
1. Retain portability of applications and data
Ensure the applications you deploy can operate across alternative cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure. This generally means avoiding dependencies on proprietary cloud services and selecting applications designed for hybrid and multi-environment deployment.
2. Maintain control over data location
Organisations should be able to choose where content is stored, particularly in redundant or disaster recovery scenarios. Look for applications that manage redundancy independently rather than relying entirely on proprietary cloud storage architectures.
3. Avoid financial lock-In
Contractual obligations are easy to identify, but pricing structures can create less obvious forms of dependency. Pay particular attention to storage and egress charges, where low ingest costs may be offset by expensive retrieval fees.
Media organisations should also consider workflows that minimise storage and transportation costs through efficient file formats and compression techniques.
Choose carefully
The message is clear: cloud strategies should be designed with sovereignty in mind from the outset. Cloud technologies can absolutely deliver next-generation operating models while still supporting sovereignty requirements. In response, we are seeing the growth of regional cloud providers, sovereign infrastructure initiatives, and a new generation of technology vendors focused on preserving customer choice and control.
As sovereignty becomes a more important consideration for media organisations, the ability to retain operational independence, maintain control of data, and avoid unnecessary lock-in will become increasingly valuable. The future of cloud is not simply about scale. It is about ensuring that organisations retain the freedom to choose how and where they operate.
