Panel Discussion at Cloud Native Zürich 2026

A Full Morning of Sovereignty at CNZ

Last week we told you that Servala would be sponsoring the Sovereignty Track at Cloud Native Zürich 2026 - and hosting the panel discussion "Digital Sovereignty - Perspectives from the Ecosystem". The event has now taken place, and it's safe to say the track delivered on its promise.

The morning kicked off with David Sterz making the case that Europe's cloud future should be distributed by design, rather than mirroring the centralized hyperscaler model. Our own Tobias Brunner followed with a talk connecting Swiss Cervelat sausages to sovereignty - and a sharp reminder that "it's all open source anyway" is not the same thing as sovereignty. Pascal Stöckli then introduced Zentrum SDS, the new "Souveräne Digitale Schweiz" initiative bringing together 32 founding organizations from federal authorities, cantons, and Swiss IT companies.

By the time the panel started, the room had already heard that digital sovereignty is distributed, political, operational - and apparently has something to do with Cervelat. Our job on the panel was to pull these threads together from the perspective of the people actually building, running, and governing this ecosystem.

Five Seats, Five Perspectives

We put together a panel that covered the ecosystem end to end:

• Lena Fuhrimann (bespinian) - the implementation partner's perspective, working directly with organizations migrating to cloud native technologies and balancing innovation, agility, and control.

• Roman Bachmann (Switch) - the cloud provider's perspective. Switch operates digital infrastructure for Swiss universities and research institutions and is itself owned by the institutions it serves - sovereignty by design, in a sense.

• Tobias Brunner (VSHN) - the managed service provider's perspective, on what it actually takes to make digital sovereignty operational: running production systems around the clock, not just writing about it.

• Simon Reber (Red Hat) - the software vendor's perspective, on how open source contributes to flexibility, interoperability, and sovereignty - and where the limits of that argument are.

• David Sommer (Digitale Gesellschaft) - the civil society perspective, broadening the conversation from technology toward democratic rights, political will, and a digital society that works for everyone.

The panel was moderated by Markus Speth (VSHN).

Five Definitions, One Question

We opened by asking the audience a simple question: how many of you have used the term "digital sovereignty" in the past six months? Almost every hand went up.

Then we asked each panelist for their own definition of digital sovereignty - and got five genuinely different answers, ranging from technical and operational framings to questions of control, resilience, and democratic values. No single definition won, which was rather the point.

From there, the discussion moved into more concrete territory: how sovereignty shows up in day-to-day project work with customers, what it means for a cloud provider to be "sovereign by design", what it takes to run sovereign infrastructure in production 24/7 rather than on a slide, whether open source is sufficient on its own or just one part of the equation, and where the real blockers sit - in technology, in budgets, or in how organizations make decisions.

We also didn't shy away from some of the harder numbers in this debate: the gap between what European IT leaders say they want to spend on local cloud alternatives and what they actually spend, and the sheer scale difference between hyperscaler investment and the European alternatives currently on the table.

What This Means for Servala

A few themes from the discussion line up closely with how we think about Servala:

Digital sovereignty is not a binary state. There's no certificate that flips an organization from "not sovereign" to "sovereign" - it's a spectrum across multiple dimensions, and frameworks like the EU Cloud Framework are starting to emerge specifically to measure that.

It's also about more than where data physically lives. Control, portability, transparency, skills, governance, and legal jurisdiction all play a role - often a bigger one than location alone.

Complete sovereignty, in the sense of controlling everything end to end, is neither realistic nor desirable. Trace any dependency chain far enough and you eventually hit hardware, raw materials, and global supply chains that no single organization - or country - fully controls. The more useful goal is understanding your dependencies and making conscious choices about them.

And perhaps most importantly: sovereignty isn't something any single company, vendor, or government can solve alone. It needs the whole ecosystem - providers, vendors, open source communities, public institutions, and civil society - all working together. That's the gap Servala is built to close: an open hub connecting cloud providers, software vendors, managed service providers, and implementation partners around sovereign, portable, cloud native services.

A Bridge, Not a Bunker

Which brings us back to a question we asked at the start: is "sovereignty" even the right word? Maybe what most organizations are really after is resilience, autonomy, or freedom of choice - the ability to make their own decisions without having to ask someone else for permission first.

One phrase from our preparation for this panel stayed with us: "sovereignty is a bridge, not a bunker." The goal isn't isolation - it's the freedom to choose your own path while staying connected to a broader ecosystem. That's exactly the model Servala is built around.

Thanks - and What's Next

A big thank you to Lena, Roman, Tobias, Simon, and David for a genuinely thoughtful discussion, and to the organizers of Cloud Native Zürich for another great edition. We were happy to be involved - VSHN as a Silver Sponsor, and Servala sponsoring the Sovereignty Track.

The recording of the full panel discussion - along with Tobias Brunner's talk on Servala earlier in the day - will be published soon. We'll share the links as soon as they're available.

We're already thinking about a follow-up session to dig deeper into some of these threads. If you'd like to be part of that conversation - or part of the growing Servala ecosystem - get in touch.

👉 For more behind-the-scenes details on the panel and the full Cloud Native Zürich 2026 recap, check out the VSHN blog post.