Episode Details

Andreas Eisenreich, CTO at Deutsche Telekom, explains why data sovereignty isn’t about location — it’s about control, informed decisions, and the ability to act on your strategic goals without vendor permission.

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Transcript:

Andreas Eisenreich: So welcome dear architects, strategists, and decision makers. You have arrived where the rules are being rewritten. The utopia of a borderless internet where one click deployments were possible and any location in the cloud is slowly dissolving. The IT galaxy is becoming more complex, more political, and yes, a bit more uncomfortable. But on very, don’t panic. We have long lived in a kind of autopia. National borders didn’t matter to us. Infrastructure was global and deployments could be distributed across the globe with a single click. The location was just a variable in a conflict file. That error is coming to an end. The topic of serenities, unfortunately, not just an abstract buzzword, but a real challenge. The impact on us as the IT industry is hard to foresee. After all, we all had the same access to technology, no matter where we in the world and almost regardless of the available budget.

The democratization of innovation and technology has made us significantly more agile. Personally, I’m more of one learning by doing guy. So the impact this will have on my way of learning, for example, remains to be seen.

[Related: Data Sovereignty Drives Enterprise IT Decisions] 

Jason Lopez: That’s Andreas Eisenreich, reading from his 2025 LinkedIn article entitled IT Sovereignty: The Hitchhiker’s Guide for Architects and Decision Makers. He’s the CTO for cloud and infrastructure at Deutsche Telekom. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. We thought having him read from his article would be a good way to start this story about how sovereignty is now a top concern. You need a way to define it before you can make a good decision about it. And firms like Gartner, IDC, and Forrester are now treating this as a primary market force, not just a footnote. We talked to Andy shortly after his team worked with Nutanix to develop a sovereign data solution for hybrid cloud. In our interview, he began with this. Data sovereignty isn’t just about where your data lives. It’s about whether you can actually use it without a vendor’s permission. He reminds his clients that physical control means nothing if your data is locked in a proprietary format that becomes inaccessible the moment you lose a license.

Andreas Eisenreich: Phase one, let’s try to free up your data. And that’s not super hard, but most of the time users are involved.

Jason Lopez: A good example, he says, is Microsoft 365. The moment you commit to any proprietary platform is the moment your data sovereignty journey and your responsibility to protect it begins.

Andreas Eisenreich: We all use it. We love it. We are partnered with Microsoft, great partners. I love the product, but that has to be an option. So if I decide I want to go with Microsoft, my responsibility from that point in time, that’s the beginning of a sovereignty journey when it comes to data.

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Jason Lopez: Andy pointed to the idea of making fully informed decisions about how data is stored and who ultimately controls it. The moment someone else holds the encryption key, regardless of what they call it, you don’t own your data, you’re just borrowing a