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What do you actually depend on? Which devices, servers and cloud services are outside your control, and under which jurisdiction do they operate? Do you know what your staff use beyond the officially approved tools? This third article in our series on digital sovereignty provides a practical method to audit your dependencies, assess your exposure and identify the first building blocks to reclaim.

Independent alternatives exist, they are mature and the first steps are within reach without disrupting your operations. From network hardware to servers, from hosting to cybersecurity, we detail how to lay a solid infrastructure foundation, step by step, without paralysing your activity. After storming the Bastille, you need to lay the foundations of your citadel.

Europe has the laws, the labels, and the rhetoric for digital sovereignty. What it lacks is consistency. Between legislation passed and contracts signed, a stubborn gap undermines the credibility of the whole project. From government procurement to school IT, tangible progress coexists with concessions that are hard to defend. Most troubling: it is in classrooms, year after year, that an addiction to closed ecosystems is being quietly built on the taxpayer's dime.

We examine what works, what doesn't, and why coherence remains the weakest link in an otherwise ambitious strategy. Sovereign alternatives exist and are proven. The only missing ingredient is the political will to scale them, from the classroom to the data-center.

In May 2025, the International Criminal Court lost access to its email system. Not because of a cyberattack or technical failure, but because Microsoft suspended the email account of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan after the U.S. President imposed sanctions on him. With a single executive order from Washington, an American corporation reached into a European institution based in The Hague and flipped the switch. This isn't a hypothetical scenario. This digital dependency touches everyone – even Europe's most sensitive institutions, designed to protect citizens and uphold justice, operate on American infrastructure that can be shut down instantly.

Review the events of your daily life and you'll feel dizzy. You turn on your computer, check your smartwatch, ask Siri or Alexa to play music, start your car, make a phone call, send an email, calculate a route... Each time, you go through a service, a server, a technology made in the USA. From hardware (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) to systems (Windows, iOS, Android) to applications (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoom), the dependency is systemic. And your habits, your life, your information, your photos... everything that goes online is no longer yours or your company's... How did we get here?

Why finance technological resources and pay technicians to manage resource consumption by bots or users who will never use your services because they are on the other side of the world? For any organization or business, leaving your servers open to the four winds is often an economic and security oversight that unnecessarily overloads your infrastructure. GeoIP Fencing, while not a requirement, becomes an attractive solution to transform your firewall into an intelligent digital "customs" gate. By filtering your incoming traffic by country, you eliminate a massive portion of network pollution and intrusion attempts from hostile nations, ensuring that every Euro invested is dedicated to an optimal, fluid, and secure experience for those who make up your legitimate audience.

If you have some experience, you know that making backups isn’t the same as being secure. You have probably already heard this reassuring line: “No worries, we run an automatic backup of all files every day.” With a bit of bad luck, you may have already experienced the limits of that approach when it’s applied indiscriminately, without oversight or control.

At OpenSource Solutions, our years of experience have taught us a hard reality: having a backup doesn’t mean being able to restore. Day-to-day server and data operations require heightened vigilance, particularly when it comes to cyber resilience. One of the most insidious pitfalls is blind trust in snapshots or global (bulk) backups. In this article, we will provide a quick diagnosis of these practices and share our “recipe” to avoid losing anything—but above all, to ensure optimal operability in record time in the event of a disaster.