How to Ensure Data Sovereignty with On-Premises Data Storage

Executive Summary

• Strategic Control and Ownership: Digital sovereignty is defined by an organization’s ability to maintain absolute control over its data, including where it is stored, who can access it, and the legal jurisdiction that governs it.
• Mitigation of Third-Party Risks: Relying on public cloud providers can introduce risks of vendor lock-in, unauthorized access by foreign governments (e.g., under the Cloud Act), and unpredictable changes in service terms or pricing.
• On-Premises Infrastructure as a Solution: Implementing on-premises data storage provides a robust framework for sovereignty, allowing organizations to keep sensitive data within their own physical and digital boundaries to ensure compliance and security.
• Balance Between Innovation and Autonomy: While cloud services offer scalability, achieving true digital sovereignty requires full operational independence and the protection of stored information, all while maintaining uninterrupted availability.

What Is Data Sovereignty

Data sovereignty is essentially about who owns the data and the IT infrastructure, and what measures are taken to ensure it stays safe and accessible.

It generally refers to two things:

• Control: Making sure the owner of the data has the power to protect it and use it at all times and under every circumstance.
• Location: Following laws that require data to be stored within a specific country or region.

Maintaining full control over data and ensuring sovereignty over it can pose a major challenge for data storage administrators, especially when it comes to storing data in locations where the data wasn’t originally generated. Protecting this information (and access to it) at all costs is crucial in order to achieve compliance with the law requirements.

Sharing this data with third-party companies (like external cloud service providers) means passing control over data to them. Unfortunately, when the data owner loses access to data, or the data is destroyed (either physically or on the digital level), the responsibility still stays with the data owner, and when it comes to storing personal information of e.g., customers, it can result in some serious consequences.

That’s why having your own on-premises data storage solution and its proper protection seems like the most responsible move. Yet – is there anything more to it?

Lack of Data Sovereignty in Real-Life Scenarios

While data sovereignty is often discussed in the abstract, the lack of it results in very real, horrific outcomes. These cases serve as a sobering reminder that your data is as safe as much control you have over it:

Case 1: Human Error and Systemic Oversight

In May 2024, Google Cloud inadvertently deleted the entire private cloud account of UniSuper, a $125 billion pension fund. This single incident was triggered by a routine maintenance procedure where an engineer misconfigured an internal tool, leading to the deletion of the subscription (and in turn data) across two separate geographies. This case demonstrates that even when data is stored within a major cloud provider’s infrastructure, a single human error can bypass automated safeguards and wipe out both primary data and backups. It proves that total reliance on an external provider’s data storage system means, in fact, a loss of digital autonomy.

Case 2: Physical Disaster and Infrastructure Negligence

The 2021 fire at OVHcloud’s Strasbourg data center illustrates how physical disasters can physically annihilate data sovereignty. Beyond the fire itself, a French court eventually ordered OVH to pay significant damages because the provider had stored client backups in the same physical building as the primary servers – contrary to safety expectations and, in some cases, contractual claims. When a disaster destroys a data center, you can’t do anything about it – the data is lost forever. It highlights that an external data storage can be easily wiped out through unwise system composition, in this case, considering the geographical residence of the original data and its backups.

Case 3: Kinetic Warfare

A landmark incident in March 2026 saw the physical targeting of data centers during an armed conflict between Iran and the U.S./Israel. Iranian drones struck Amazon Web Services (AWS) centers in the UAE and Bahrain, while retaliatory strikes hit facilities in Tehran. This case proves that even facilities that belong to commercial cloud providers, which are not directly involved in the conflict, can also become military targets. In a kinetic conflict, your data sovereignty is put to the test. If you hand over your data to a third-party solution provider, you lose data sovereignty even before a missile strikes. As you see, it is very possible that hosting data with “hyperscalers” can inadvertently place civilian assets directly in the crosshairs of global warfare.

Why an On-Premises Data Storage System Is Key for Maintaining Data Sovereignty

Your own data storage system gives you full control over the data you store. You decide who has access to which resources, and you can clearly see where the data is stored. You can also monitor the condition of both the software environment and the physical hardware setup to detect any errors and symptoms before any actual failure occurs. To streamline the system management, you can also consider recomposition of your current storage approach into a centralized data storage solution or switching to a hyper-converged storage infrastructure.

The on-premises data storage has many configuration options to choose from, and the level of defined data protection is totally up to you. At the same time, you may have some concerns, especially as running your own system requires buying your own hardware parts. Considering the rapid changes in hardware prices and availability, it may pose a challenge. The solution lies in using a software-defined storage solution like Open-E JovianDSS, which grants you an unique advantage of hardware agnosticism.

Hardware Agnosticism

Being one of the distinct features of Open-E JovianDSS, hardware agnosticism lets you build your data storage system with your components of choice. It lets you overcome the consequences of hardware price spikes, as well as its limited availability. With a hardware-agnostic data storage solution, you are able to choose from many alternative hardware components to find the configuration that best matches your budget and expectations. It also allows you to easily swap hardware if any part of your system fails.

How Data Sovereignty Enhances Business Resilience

Data sovereignty is a prime example of how maintaining absolute control over your digital assets directly strengthens your operational backbone. While often viewed through a technical lens, achieving true data autonomy poses a strategic advantage for organizations across all sectors, particularly those in critical infrastructure like energy, healthcare, and transport, where downtime or data loss is not an option.

By maintaining an on-premises data storage system, organizations exercise full sovereign control over their infrastructure & data. This ensures that sensitive operational intelligence remains insulated from geopolitical risks, international trade fluctuations, or unauthorized access by foreign service providers.

This setup transforms data management into a proactive defense mechanism. Through features like immutable snapshots and asynchronous replication, companies can bridge the gap between simple data storage and true operational endurance. Ultimately, an in-house, sovereign approach allows a business to treat its data as a “future-proof” asset, securing the digital autonomy required to thrive in an unpredictable global landscape.

Open-E JovianDSS – Where Data Protection Meets Data Sovereignty

Guaranteed Integrity and Business Continuity

• Ransomware-Resilient Snapshots: Using Copy-on-Write (COW) architecture, snapshots are read-only point-in-time copies. These provide an unalterable recovery mechanism.
• Active-Active HA Clustering: Open-E JovianDSS specializes in Active-Active High Availability, guaranteeing the availability of critical operations, a core pillar of both sovereignty and compliance.
• Backup Servers: with Open-E JovianDSS, you can set up both local and remote backup servers, which provide the ultimate On-  & Off-site Data Protection!
• Silent Data Corruption Protection: ZFS performs end-to-end integrity verification using checksums to proactively detect and correct “bit rot,” ensuring your data plane remains trustworthy.

Encryption and Access Control

• Native ZFS Encryption: Supports data-at-rest encryption where the administrator retains the keys, providing a safeguard against physical theft.
• Granular Delegation: Moving beyond simple root/non-root access, the zfs allow command enables precise role-based access to datasets, supporting Zero-Trust principles.

Save Your Company from Unnecessary Problems and Extra Expenses

By taking total control over the way you store and protect your data, you also avoid any unnecessary stress and financial consequences. With in-house data storage systems like those based on Open-E JovianDSS, you have a unique chance to deal with the consequences of ever-present digital threats, and you can minimize the chance of any hardware-related disaster.

Download the Open-E JovianDSS 60-day free trial to experience a new level of data storage system reliability!