The Hybrid Sovereign State : Can Europe build digital resilience without decoupling from global platforms?
As Europe's digital backbone grows more critical, so does its exposure to disruption. This session explores how operators, regulators, and engineers are rethinking infrastructure design to withstand geopolitical, environmental, and technical shocks, without sacrificing the pace of innovation.
Europe's pursuit of digital sovereignty has moved from a policy aspiration to an operational reality. Across governments and public administrations, questions about technological dependencies, resilience, security, interoperability and strategic autonomy are increasingly shaping procurement decisions and digital transformation programmes.
At the same time, public institutions already operate within highly interconnected ecosystems that combine European solutions, open-source technologies, proprietary software and global cloud platforms. Complete independence is neither technically nor economically realistic. Yet unmanaged dependencies can create strategic vulnerabilities.
The central challenge is therefore no longer whether Europe should choose between sovereign and global technologies, but how governments can design resilient digital ecosystems that remain secure, adaptable and capable of action under changing geopolitical, economic and technological conditions.
Bringing together perspectives from public administration, technology providers, open-source initiatives and system integrators, this session will explore what digital sovereignty means in practice, which dependencies strengthen resilience and which create risk, and how hybrid operating models may become the foundation of Europe's future digital state.
