Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (SDIS) — SDIS 02: Sovereign Cloud Architectures

SDIS-02 — Sovereign Cloud Architectures: Technical Patterns for Jurisdictional Control Over Compute, Storage, and Operations

"Sovereign cloud" is now a checkbox on public-sector RFPs, but the term describes a wide spectrum of architectures with very different resilience properties. This paper catalogs the technical patterns used to build sovereign cloud platforms — from simple regional isolation to full confidential-computing stacks with local key custody and escrowed operations — and evaluates each against the four-plane framework introduced in SDIS-01 (data, compute, operations, and governance).

The paper traces the market and technical history of sovereign cloud offerings, with particular attention to the gap between marketed sovereignty and architecturally verifiable sovereignty. It examines eleven detailed case studies, including the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework and France's SecNumCloud qualification, addresses common objections to the pattern taxonomy, and specifies a reference architecture that composes with the compute-sovereignty patterns in SDIS-05 and the zero-trust controls in SDIS-08. It closes with an implementation roadmap, a self-assessment checklist, and a glossary for practitioners building or procuring sovereign cloud infrastructure.

Keywords: sovereign cloud, Gaia-X, SecNumCloud, confidential computing, hyperscaler dependency

This is Paper 2 of 12 in the Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (D-AI), building directly on the four-plane reference framework established in SDIS-01. A companion series guide (SDIS-00) provides a full cross-citation map, publication registry, and licensing terms for all papers.

Series: Sovereign Digital Infrastructure Series (SDIS) · Publication: SDIS-02 · Author: Bijan Burnard · Affiliation: D-AI Research · Version: 1.0 · Publication Date: 23 August 2026 · ISBN: 978-969-9597-30-5 · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22081556 · License: CC BY 4.0