According to Martin Hager, founder and CEO of communications service provider Retarus, the European Digital Sovereignty Summit 2025 in Berlin has set a central and long-overdue focus: strengthening European digital independence. It is now crucial that political announcements are followed by concrete implementation steps. ‘The announcement to move from debate to concrete implementation is important. The decisive factor will be whether we find the courage to actually reduce dependencies and build and scale our own solutions in Europe,’ said Hager.
The commentary focuses on three strategic key points that, from the entrepreneur’s point of view, are crucial for not only demanding digital sovereignty politically, but also implementing it technologically and economically.
Sovereignty as a basis for operations
Hager emphasises that sovereignty is not an abstract idea, but an operational necessity. Recent outages at international technology and cloud providers have exposed the vulnerability of digital value chains. ‘Recent disruptions at major cloud and platform providers have shown how vulnerable value chains are when a few gatekeepers falter.’ Companies with critical processes therefore need ‘freedom of choice, technical transparency and legal control – not just best effort and nice-sounding SLAs.’
Open standards as the basis for independence
As a second pillar, Hager points to the importance of open, interoperable technologies. European innovations such as GSM and ISDN serve as historical examples. ‘European companies have […] demonstrated how interoperability reduces costs, increases resilience and drives innovation in the interests of the customer.’ Proprietary systems from large platform providers, on the other hand, lead to monopolies and increased dependency. This results in a strategic architectural decision: ‘Where it is critical, we should build. Where we buy, interfaces must remain open and portable.’
Regulation as an enabler, not a burden
Current EU regulations, including NIS2 and DORA, confirm actual risks, but significantly increase the burden, especially for SMEs and regulated sectors. ‘If we are serious about sovereignty, we need simplified, harmonised rules and certification across Europe, clear B2B-specific guidelines and implementation that is feasible.’ The announced Digital Omnibus should therefore ‘simplify and harmonise rules – but without weakening fundamental rights and without double regulation.’
Investment, procurement and ‘Buy European’
Hager welcomes French efforts to prioritise financing and European technology preferences, but at the same time calls for greater investment in skills and infrastructure. Germany’s economic restraint is an obstacle: ‘Germany’s culture of risk aversion is a real hurdle here.’ Public procurement must take greater account of European suppliers and give greater weight to criteria such as data sovereignty and vendor lock-in. ‘Today’s companies want revenue, not subsidies. In these isolationist times, we must not be afraid to say “buy European”.’
Cloud: modular instead of monolithic – criticism of Gaia-X
For the cloud sector, Hager calls for flexible architectures that control data storage as needed and enable multi-source strategies. What is needed, he says, are ‘clear exit strategies, technical controllability and robust interoperability across providers.’ He is critical of complex models such as Gaia-X: Companies need to ‘feel their way towards solutions – quite the opposite of complex architecture models such as Gaia-X.’
Sovereignty as an economic factor
For the summit to have an impact, Hager believes that sovereignty should be measurable: ‘We define sovereignty as competitiveness – measurable in terms of market share for European solutions, time-to-market and export quota.’ This requires simplified market access, accelerated approvals for data centres and AI projects, for example, and binding open standards to make ‘supplier switching, multi-sourcing and European scaling a reality.’
Hager considers the path to technological and economic self-confidence in Europe to be challenging but necessary. ‘The road is rocky. But it is essential to secure Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and freedom in the future.’
