Source: Modern Work & AI Blog – Rob Quickenden, Cisilion CTO
Cisco yesterday announced what they referred to as a “significant milestone” in Europe’s journey toward digital sovereignty.
Their Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio is a comprehensive, air-gapped solution designed to give European organisations full control over their digital environments – from infrastructure, through collaboration, through to data.
This will be available from the end of this month (September 2025).
Why Sovereignty Matters?
The concept of digital sovereignty is not new, but its urgency has accelerated due to the increasing geopolitical tensions, evolving compliance frameworks, and the rise of AI-powered infrastructure.
Some organisations across Europe – ranging from governments to banks and healthcare providers are looking for more ways to obtain better more autonomy and control over all or aspects of their IT environments, expecially in fields such as research and development or for high wealth clients etc.
You may recall, Microsoft announced their Sovereign Cloud offering for Microsoft 365 and Azure “local” earlier this year.
The technology will enable organisations to formally meet compliance requirements by delivering solutions aligned with key foundational, EU and country certifications and standards and ultimately achieving the new European Union Cybersecurity Certification (EUCC).
Is this just on-prem Data Centers?
Yes… but no. Cisco’s new offering is not just about hosting data and compute services locally; it’s about owning the infrastructure, managing encryption, and ensuring operational resilience without external dependencies. The other important aspect is the infrastructure is managed in the same fluid ways that cloud infrastructure is managed rather than the trabdiotnal ways of managing and patching applications and updates that were familiar in on premises environments.
It will enable organisations to deploy hybrid or on premises solutions aligned with key foundational, EU and country certifications and standards and ultimately achieving the new European Union Cybersecurity Certification (EUCC).
What does Cisco’s Sovereign Infrastructure include?
This infrastructure portfolio includes:
- Configurable and Air-Gapped: Customers will be able to deploy the infrastructure on-premises, with full control over licensing and encryption. Cisco cannot remotely disable or update products — a major shift in trust and control.
- Compliance-Ready: The portfolio aligns with EU and country-specific certifications, including IPv6-readiness, Common Criteria, and a roadmap toward the EU Cybersecurity Certification (EUCC).
- Broad Coverage: It will span routing, switching, wireless, collaboration, and select endpoint devices. It will be enhanced by Cisco and Splunk’s end to end security and observability solutions.
Strategic Business Enablement
What is important to take away here is that this is not just a new product announcement. For many EU organisations it will be seen as a niche buisness enabler.
For organisations needing or wanting to navigate true hybrid environments, address increasing regulatory pressures, and manage AI adoption, model training and AI R&D for closed systems, Cisco’s Sovereign Critical Infrastructure offers a flexible foundation for building secure, compliant, and future-ready AI and digital estates.
IDC’s commentary on this shares that they are seeing huge increases in spend (across KEY European counties) on on-premises DC infrastructure which is reinforces this shift. They say that on-prem IT is now commanding the majority of IT budgets across parts of Europe despite the overall continual rise of hybrid and cloud services models.
“On-prem IT still requires connectivity. Here the importance of network sovereignty cannot be underestimated, especially for organizations responsible for critical national infrastructure.
Operational resilience is key for these organizations, who seek the extra controls, protections, and autonomy that genuine digital sovereignty solutions can bring.
This is especially true when it comes to network sovereignty—a challenge that few network infrastructure providers thus far have been able to address.” | IDC
Sovereignty, especially in networking, in these scenarios is essential.
Closing thoughts
Cisco’s goal is to better enable European organisations to build infrastructure that uniquely aligned to their needs whether that is hybrid cloud or descretely on-premises. The platform promises not only secure and compliant infrastructure services but also benefits from modern management, resilient and autonomous operations which is a critical capability in the AI and digitial transformation era.