Sovereignty Through Portability

Digital sovereignty is increasingly becoming a strategic success factor in public administration and SMEs. At the same time, dependency on large cloud providers is increasing, which brings with it the risk of vendor lock-in. Many IT decision-makers are asking themselves how to make their IT infrastructure portable and thus less dependent on individual providers. This blog article shows practical solutions for avoiding vendor lock-in and increasing the multi-cloud capability of IT. The focus is on technological approaches such as Kubernetes, containerization, virtual machines (VMs), portable images, and open source tools such as Terraform.

Vendor lock-in refers to dependence on a specific IT provider or cloud platform. If a company is deeply anchored in a provider's ecosystem, switching to another platform becomes difficult and expensive - dependencies on applications and data often play a role here. In practice, this dependency means you entirely rely on a cloud provider for specific services. Switching to another provider is only possible at considerable cost or with technical difficulties. Digital sovereignty, on the other hand, means retaining complete control over your data, applications, and infrastructure. For the public sector in particular, this is essential to comply with data protection and regulatory requirements. However, medium-sized companies also realize that a vendor lock-in can limit their flexibility and negotiating position.

Surveys confirm that it is primarily the avoidance of dependencies (41%) and adherence to compliance requirements (42%) that are driving companies towards multi-cloud, ahead of technical reasons such as resilience (32%). This underlines that multi-cloud portability is not an end in itself, but a business-critical success factor. (see Multi-cloud users driven by compliance, lock-in worries - The Register)
 

Multi-cloud capability is running IT workloads and applications on multiple cloud platforms in parallel or moving them as required. Instead of throwing all services "into one pot" at a single hyperscaler, organizations distribute their systems across different environments in a targeted manner. This creates a flexible network in which every workload can run in the optimum environment.

For IT decision-makers, a multi-cloud approach offers several advantages: It increases resilience, as the failure of one provider can be absorbed. In addition, the optimal services from different providers can be used depending on requirements, significantly strengthening the negotiating position. Last but not least, multi-cloud supports compliance by keeping sensitive data in clouds with a suitable level of data protection or location. For example, personal data can remain in a national sovereign cloud, while less critical workloads are outsourced to a more cost-effective public cloud.

Technology alone is not enough—you also need the right tools to manage a multi-cloud environment efficiently. Open-source tools have established themselves as the de facto standard here, as they work independently of manufacturers and enjoy broad support within the community. One key tool is Terraform from HashiCorp.
 

Terraform allows infrastructure to be defined as code and resources provisioned in different clouds using the same scripts. Only the cloud provider is changed in the configuration, standardising the provisioning of VMs, networks, or databases everywhere. A subsequent change of provider usually requires only minor adjustments to the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) scripts instead of rewriting everything. This automation increases portability, reduces errors, and speeds up commissioning.

Tools such as Ansible and Helm supplement this. Ansible can automatically roll out applications and configurations across platforms so that, for example, servers in Azure and on-premises are at the same level. Helm allows complex applications to be installed portably as packages (charts) on different Kubernetes clusters. These tools form an abstract orchestration layer across the clouds and enable vendor-neutral operation.

A theoretical strategy is one thing, but what does implementation look like in practice? Two examples from the perspective of users illustrate the benefits of portable IT architectures:

1. Public sector - Sovereign cloud solution: A state authority does not want to depend on just one cloud provider for data sovereignty and compliance. Therefore, it opts for a multi-cloud architecture: critical citizen data remains in a national sovereign cloud, while less sensitive applications run in Microsoft Azure to benefit from scalability and modern services. The infrastructure is defined as code with Terraform and rolled out consistently in both clouds. Applications run on Kubernetes clusters in both environments. A uniform configuration keeps everything synchronized. This allows the authority to move workloads between the clouds as required - for example, to comply with new regulatory requirements or to optimize costs - without redeveloping the applications.
2. Medium-sized companies - flexibility and cost benefits: A medium-sized company initially operates its e-commerce platform in a single public cloud. However, as its success grows, so do the costs and the risk of provider dependency. The company, therefore, opted for a hybrid/multi-cloud strategy. Core components of the platform are containerized and migrated to Kubernetes. Parts of the load continue to run in the previous cloud, but can be moved to a second cloud or the company's own data center if required. The infrastructure is automated with Terraform, so that a switch or parallel operation is seamlessly possible. The result: is that operations remain highly available and scalable, while the company saves costs as it can flexibly use the most cost-effective environment.

These examples show that greater portability in IT architecture is not an end in itself, but contributes directly to value creation. Both public institutions and SMEs can react more quickly to changes, spread risks, and strategically align their IT.