Digital sovereignty is commonly discussed in political or economic terms. This presentation treats it as a technical and architectural challenge that emerges from concrete implementation choices.

Through a case study, migrating virtual machines between a single cloud provider, we show how portability constraints (boot firmware, licenses and export restrictions), arise even within a single seemingly homogeneous environment, and how these constraints can lead to a vendor lock-in.

Building on this foundational work, we extended the OS migration platform to include multiple cloud providers. The focus is on enabling seamless migration and orchestration between providers while respecting your local compliance, performance, and sovereignty requirements.

By installing our existing open source migration platform on your server, you can migrate your server away from US hyperscalers by a single submit-click today.

On our roadmap for this project we create a selection tool, to select the best cloud provider. We highlight the key metrics and trade-offs that must guide platform selection. We are using the methods from the academic world (MultiCriteria-Desicion Making, MCDM) to indentity importance of: interoperability, energy efficiency, legal jurisdiction, costs, and operational complexity. Our analysis identifies patterns that allow organizations to make informed, scalable choices rather than relying on vendor defaults.

The presentation concludes with a forward-looking view: a practical framework for designing a multi-provider, open-source-ready VM strategy. This approach helps European organizations retain flexibility, reduce hidden lock-ins, and align cloud choices with strategic and ethical objectives.