A Growing Movement for Independence
This week, the Dutch Parliament called for the country to reduce its reliance on U.S. cloud providers. It’s not the first to make such a move — and it won’t be the last.
At first glance, it makes perfect sense:
If your national infrastructure is built on someone else’s servers, is it really yours?
Rethinking Where Sovereignty Begins
But here’s the thing:
Sovereignty in the digital world doesn’t begin with where the data sits. It begins with who holds the keys.
Because it’s not the sovereignty of the cloud that really matters —
It’s the sovereignty of the key material that encrypts the data in the cloud that’s critical.
Let’s take a breath and think about that.
Data Moves. Trust Must Be Anchored.
Data, by its very nature, flows.
It crosses borders, moves between systems, is duplicated, cached, and backed up across continents.
You can localise infrastructure — but in a cloud-native world, controlling the flow of data is complex and increasingly unrealistic.
So instead of building national firewalls around the entire stack, we might ask a better question:
What If You Could Use Global Infrastructure — And Still Stay Sovereign?
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The cryptographic keys — the ones that encrypt, sign, authenticate and ultimately trust your digital world — those are what truly matter.
They’re what matter to governments.
To companies.
To every person sending data across the internet.
And if those keys are generated, stored, or managed by someone else?
Then you’ve already handed over sovereignty, regardless of where your servers are.
The Scale Dilemma
Here’s the catch:
Cloud infrastructure still needs scale.
Resilience, cost-efficiency, interoperability — all of it depends on large-scale systems.
Most national or regional cloud solutions — no matter how well-intentioned — struggle to deliver that scale on their own.
So we’re left with a dilemma:
How do we stay sovereign without having to build a sovereign version of everything?
Own the Root of Trust
The answer — or at least a powerful step forward — is this:
Own your cryptographic roots.
The place where trust begins.
Where keys are born, validated, rotated, and protected.
Where Aretiico Comes In
At Aretiico, this is where we work.
Not in the middle of the cloud stack — but at the very edge of trust.
We help organisations hold onto what matters:
The keys. The authority. The sovereignty.
A Subtle but Powerful Pivot
So while the current conversation in Europe is focused on cloud independence, we’d offer a slight but important shift in perspective:
Don’t just ask where your data lives.
Ask who controls the keys.
That’s the real frontier of digital independence.
