In 2026, digital sovereignty starts with infrastructure choices
For years, the direction seemed obvious. To gain agility, accelerate deployments, and simplify operations, companies moved their workloads to the public cloud, standardized their environments, and multiplied managed services. This trajectory delivered real benefits. It modernized technical foundations, reduced certain operational friction, and enabled faster execution.
But in 2026, that framework no longer holds. Not because the cloud has become irrelevant, but because the conditions have changed. Technological dependency, data sensitivity, operational resilience, and the ability to regain control have become central concerns. Digital sovereignty is no longer just an institutional ambition. It is becoming a very concrete question of governance.
In other words, infrastructure is re-entering the strategic domain.
AI changes the equation
The rise of AI is accelerating this shift. For the past two years, it has not only transformed products and use cases. It has also reshaped the economics of infrastructure itself. Compute, memory, storage, energy, available capacity, and cost predictability are once again critical variables.
For a CIO, this fundamentally changes the nature of trade-offs. Infrastructure is no longer just a topic of optimization. It is once again a topic of control. Companies must now ask themselves how far they are willing to depend on external ecosystems to run workloads that have become more sensitive, more costly, and more central to their business.
The real issue is not about picking a side
In this context, framing the debate as cloud versus on-premise is a false dichotomy. Going all-in on cloud is not a mistake. Going all-in on on-premise is not a universal answer. The real question for CIOs lies elsewhere: which components must remain tightly controlled? On which workloads must reversibility be preserved? At what threshold does dependency become a risk?
That is where digital sovereignty begins in 2026. Not in the rejection of a model, but in the ability to make informed choices. A company is sovereign when it can decide where to run its workloads based on their criticality, data sensitivity, performance requirements, regulatory constraints, and long-term cost equation.
It is also sovereign when it still possesses the expertise needed to avoid being entirely at the mercy of its vendors. Because sovereignty does not come down to infrastructure location alone. It depends equally on the ability to design, operate, and evolve that infrastructure.
Hybrid is no longer a compromise — it's a strategy
This is the logic we apply at Positive. Our conviction did not emerge with AI. Part of our platform has long run on on-premise infrastructure, backed by in-house expertise in operations and scaling. In parallel, we also operate extensively in the public cloud. Today, our model rests on a roughly 50/50 balance between cloud and on-premise.
This balance is not ideological. It reflects a portfolio rationale. Some workloads benefit fully from the flexibility of cloud. Others justify a more direct level of control. We have structured this approach with on-premise teams in France and Germany, and Cloud DevOps hubs in Poland, France, and Italy.
This operational depth changes everything. It allows us to choose the right environment based on the actual need, rather than forcing every use case into a single model. It is within this logic that we are reinforcing our on-premise footprint in 2026, notably to support the migration of User.com by Positive to on-premise environments.
Again, this is not about turning away from the cloud. It is about reclaiming latitude — over long-term costs, over the protection of certain data, over performance predictability, and over the freedom to experiment. As of February, this infrastructure already represented 8.81 THz of CPU capacity, 8.7 TB of RAM, and 158 TB of storage.
What CIOs should take away
The winning model is neither all-cloud nor all-on-premise. It is hybrid, conceived as a strategy for control. Cloud remains essential for elasticity, deployment speed, and access to advanced services. On-premise regains value when cost, latency, security, sovereignty, or data control concerns become structurally significant.
But this approach requires real discipline. A credible hybrid strategy is not about scattering workloads arbitrarily. It demands consistent security standards, cross-environment observability, a FinOps culture, robust automation, and teams capable of sustainably operating multiple models without accumulating organizational debt.
Sovereignty, therefore, is not primarily a matter of assets. It is, above all, a matter of competence.
Sovereignty begins with keeping options open
Europe is right to place digital sovereignty at the center of the debate. But for companies, it does not begin in slogans or posturing. It begins in an architecture diagram, in location decisions, in dependency governance, and in the ability to keep multiple viable options on the table.
In 2026, infrastructure is once again strategic because the context is more constrained, more volatile, and more demanding. In this new cycle, the most resilient organizations will not be those that talked most about sovereignty. They will be those that retained enough control to never depend on a single option.
