IBM Introduces New Software to Address Digital Sovereignty Imperative

From News Desk

IBM has announced IBM Sovereign Core, an AI-ready sovereign-enabled software for enterprises, governments and service providers to build, deploy and manage AI-ready sovereign environments. Organisations around the world are facing a growing imperative to exercise control over their technology infrastructure. Driven by evolving regulatory requirements; and the need for auditable governance, enterprises and governments are seeking self-managed environments where they maintain complete operational authority, particularly as they deploy AI workloads that amplify sovereignty concerns.

Digital sovereignty goes beyond data residency. It encompasses who operates and controls the technology environment, how data is accessed and governed, where workloads execute; and under whose jurisdiction AI models run. Yet most organisations lack a destination to land, modernise and re-host applications under sovereign control. This includes applications that will incorporate AI capabilities; and have continuous compliance reporting capabilities. “Gartner predicts that more than 75% of all enterprises will have a digital sovereignty strategy by 2030, often sovereign Cloud strategies.”

“As AI adoption accelerates in India, businesses will need to innovate while meeting tightening regulatory requirements and controlling sensitive data and AI workloads. It is crucial as large language models and agentic workflows often process sensitive data and maintaining local authority is essential for confident AI adoption,” said Sandip Patel, MD, IBM India & South Asia. “IBM Sovereign Core offers an AI-ready sovereign stack, providing organizations with control, ensuring compliance and operational autonomy. It is designed for flexibility and is part of our long-standing commitment to empowering clients with an open hybrid cloud approach. Sovereignty solutions built on open-source foundations and open standards helps ensure organisations are not ‘locked in’ to infrastructure or ‘locked out’ of entering the innovation ecosystem.”

IBM Sovereign Core will help customers achieve verifiable sovereignty and full operational control. Sovereign Core is purpose-built software to build, deploy and manage Cloud-native and AI workloads under an organization’s own authority, within chosen jurisdictions, built on Red Hat’s open source foundation. Unlike approaches that layer sovereignty controls onto existing architectures, Sovereign Core makes sovereignty an inherent property of the software itself. Organizations can gain –

Customer-operated control plane – organisations maintain direct operational authority over software operations, deployment decisions and system configurations without intermediation from a vendor not in region.
In-boundary identity and keys – all authentication, authorisation, encryption keys and access management remain within jurisdiction boundaries under customer control.
Ongoing compliance enablement and generated evidence of continuous compliance –comprehensive operational data, system telemetry and audit trails are generated, stored; and managed within the sovereign boundary, including automated identity.
Governed AI inference: AI model deployment and hosting, local GPU clusters, local inference execution and agent operations occur under local governance with traceability and oversight, without exporting data to external providers.
Ease of deployment: delivering sovereignty at scale with consistency and flexibility allowing organisations to stand up isolated environments with built-in multitenancy capabilities within a matter of days of deployment; choice of hardware and infrastructure.

“The sovereign AI conversation has focused on data residency, but that’s only part of the equation,” said Sanjeev Mohan, Principal, SanjMo. “IBM Sovereign Core addresses the harder question – who controls the system and can you prove it to regulators? IBM takes a holistic approach spanning data, operations, technology and assurance, with continuous monitoring. As AI moves into production, that kind of ongoing accountability becomes non-negotiable.”

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