Digital sovereignty – A cornerstone of future-ready IT architectures

Professor Dr Martin Kaloudis and Steven Handgraetinger

This positioning statement on digital sovereignty is based on the work of the Bechtle Group’s Digital Sovereignty think tank. The authors: Professor Dr Martin Kaloudis (left), Executive Vice President for the Central and West Germany cluster, and Steven Handgrätinger, Executive Vice President for the Public Sector, both at Bechtle AG.

This positioning statement on digital sovereignty is based on the work of the Bechtle Group’s Digital Sovereignty think tank. The authors: Professor Dr Martin Kaloudis (left), Executive Vice President for the Central and West Germany cluster, and Steven Handgrätinger, Executive Vice President for the Public Sector, both at Bechtle AG.

In this sense, digital sovereignty extends beyond purely technological systems to include operational and strategic dimensions. This perspective reflects a holistic, architecture-driven approach. It’s about recognising and reducing both current and future dependencies—shaping systems in a way that ensures operating models remain undisrupted, controllable, and economically efficient.

The following principles are essential:

Ensuring freedom of choice in terms of technologies and providers.
Building robust systems that can withstand disruptions and external influence.
Enhancing resilience through deliberate alternative strategies, minimised dependencies, and viable exit scenarios.

Our understanding of digital sovereignty explicitly does not imply technological isolation. Rather, it involves developing resilient, end-to-end architectures. It represents a structured state characterised by transparency, informed decision-making, and a range of actionable options across different scenarios.

Bechtle – Europe’s trusted IT partner for digital sovereignty.

Our goal is to systematically strengthen freedom of choice, reliability, and resilience for our customers—tailored to their specific business models, organisational purpose, and future development.

We focus on objective, needs-based consulting and offer one of the most comprehensive portfolios of technologies and services in Europe—supported by deep market insights and a thorough understanding of each customer’s specific requirements.

Bechtle – Europe’s trusted IT partner for digital sovereignty.

Our goal is to systematically strengthen freedom of choice, reliability, and resilience for our customers—tailored to their specific business models, organisational purpose, and future development.

Our value proposition:

Extensive experience in integrating digital infrastructures—from workplace to data centre, from on-premise to multi-cloud, and from business applications to artificial intelligence.
Decades of operational expertise across diverse IT environments, delivered by highly qualified specialists and through managed services.
Access to established and specialised manufacturer and partner networks in Germany, across Europe, and worldwide.
A vendor-neutral approach combined with in-depth product knowledge.

From strategy to structure.

Bechtle supports businesses and public-sector organisations in systematically analysing, assessing, and evolving their IT architectures with the aim of enhancing their digital sovereignty. Our approach is adaptable to the specific requirements and maturity levels of diverse organisations—whether in the highly regulated public sector, in the commercial sector with its focus on innovation and competitiveness, or in the financial sector with its stringent demands for compliance and the integrity of critical systems.

Our methodology enables:

The assessment of applications, infrastructure, and processes.
A cross-functional view of technology, organisation, and regulatory frameworks.
The identification of areas for action and risk categories.

Based on these insights, organisations can implement targeted technical, procedural, and organisational measures. This allows them to actively reduce single-source dependencies and the associated business risks—resulting not only in greater flexibility, but also in stronger resilience to regulatory, geopolitical, or market-driven change.

Conclusion.

Ensuring digital sovereignty is a manageable process. Bechtle provides strategic guidance and a unique ecosystem of expertise and technologies to support this journey. As a trusted European IT partner to both the private and public sectors, we have been designing future-ready IT solutions and operating models for over four decades—with no dependency on specific vendors or technologies, experienced in analysing complex IT environments, and deeply embedded in the market. That’s how we build IT architectures that remain sovereign in the long term.

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Steven Handgrätinger has been with Bechtle AG since 2004 and has held the position of Executive Vice President for the Public Sector since 2022. Prior to joining Bechtle, he held various sales and leadership roles at Siemens and Siemens Nixdorf, and was managing director at COMICS Informationssysteme GmbH / COMLINE AG. From 2006 to 2019, he also served as chair of the board of itSMF Deutschland e.V. on a voluntary basis.

Professor Dr Martin Kaloudis has been Executive Vice President for the Central and West Germany cluster at Bechtle AG since 2023. He also holds a professorship in Business Informatics at AKAD University Stuttgart, where he specialises in the digital sovereignty of systems and states, as well as cybersecurity. Before joining Bechtle, he spent over 20 years in senior IT roles at Deutsche Bahn and most recently served as CEO of BWI, the IT systems integrator for the German Federal Armed Forces and the federal government.

Milestones as an implementation partner for digital sovereignty.

Since Bechtle began its multi-cloud service business in 2017, freedom of choice in sourcing cloud services has been a cornerstone of our comprehensive portfolio. It enables both private and public-sector customers to easily purchase and manage a wide range of cloud services—from public cloud offerings to enterprise-grade solutions—via a single platform.

In addition to all major hyperscalers, including providers of public cloud services for the German Federal Administration, we also work with key European cloud providers such as IONOS (since 2020), Plusserver and OVHcloud (both since 2021), and STACKIT (since 2023). These award-winning partnerships have demonstrated their value in numerous customer projects across Europe.

Our collaborations have been further strengthened through projects focused on digital sovereignty, such as the implementation of Dataport’s open-source-based administrative workplace, dPhoenix Suite (2020), and the GAIA-X flagship project POSSIBLE (2021), which aimed to demonstrate the technological and economic potential of a European cloud that meets the highest standards of data sovereignty, availability, and innovation.

Bechtle has been a partner of the European Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project since 2021, winning lots for the same project again in 2025. Since 2023, Bechtle has also partnered with Swiss-based VNC – Virtual Network Consult AG on open-source enterprise applications. And since 2024, Bechtle has offered a digitally sovereign collaboration solution based on Nextcloud, which can be hosted in a Bechtle-operated data centre in Germany, at the Federal Information Technology Centre (ITZBund), or with another cloud provider.