What is Sovereign Collaboration? Complete Guide for Defense & Intelligence Leaders

December 4, 2025

Collaboration

For leaders in the Defense, Intelligence, Security, or Critical infrastructure (DISC), rules around where data lives and who controls it are tightening fast. The term “sovereign collaboration” is showing up more in procurement discussions, risk assessments, and vendor evaluations. But what does sovereign collaboration mean for operations?

Why Data Sovereignty Matters

The Evolution from Data Location to Data Control

Data sovereignty used to be about keeping data inside the country’s borders and complying with local laws. But today, sovereignty means having full control over your data, your infrastructure, and your compliance posture regardless of where systems are physically located…and governments are increasingly building frameworks to enforce this concept. In fact, 137 countries now have data protection laws on the books. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), China’s Cybersecurity Law (CSL), and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act aren’t just frameworks to regulate where data sits. They dictate who can access it, how it moves across borders, and what happens when governments come knocking with subpoenas.

For organizations operating across multiple jurisdictions, this creates a compliance labyrinth that grows more complex every quarter… and these are creating significant financial risks for organizations struggling with compliance. By January 2025, GDPR enforcement had resulted in approximately €5.88 billion in fines. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission issued €530 million in penalties to TikTok for unlawful data transfers, while other tech giants faced nine-figure fines for sovereignty violations. Beyond abstract regulatory risks, these are significant financial consequences.

What is Sovereign Collaboration?

Sovereign collaboration enables organizations to maintain complete control over their data, infrastructure, and compliance posture while collaborating across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. Unlike traditional cloud platforms where you upload data to vendor-controlled servers, sovereign collaboration ensures your encryption keys, access policies, and audit logs remain under your direct management—never exposed to third-party oversight or foreign legal jurisdictions.

Currently, when working with most cloud platforms, you upload your data to someone else’s servers, accept their terms of service, and hope they’re following the regulations that apply to your mission. When EU regulators or Chinese authorities demand access, that cloud provider answers to their home country’s laws first; not yours. For instance, the U.S. Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act allows federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data is stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil. This creates “third-party monitoring risk;” wherein vendor-controlled infrastructure may expose your operations to foreign oversight.

Three Pillars of Sovereign Collaboration

Sovereign collaboration flips the traditional cloud model on its head. Instead of trusting third-party providers with your data, infrastructure, and access policies, you maintain direct control over all three.

Complete Infrastructure Control

You choose where systems are deployed, whether that’s public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, or air-gapped environments. You’re not locked into a vendor’s data centers or subject to their geopolitical relationships. For defense, government, and critical infrastructure organizations, this flexibility is often a legal requirement.

Data Authority Without Compromise

Your encryption keys stay in your hands, and your access policies remain under your management, while your audit logs live on your infrastructure. There’s no middleman with administrative privileges who could – intentionally or otherwise – access your communications.

Deployment Across Classification Boundaries

For teams that need to collaborate across information systems with different classification levels or coordinate with coalition partners operating under different security frameworks, sovereign platforms scale across these boundaries without creating compliance violations or operational friction.

Why Sovereign Collaboration Matters for Defense & Intelligence Operations

The Salt Typhoon Breach: A Case Study in Infrastructure Risk

Defense organizations face mounting pressure to control where mission communications flow. The late 2024 Salt Typhoon breach – which Senator Mark Warner called “the most serious telecom hack in our nation’s history” – demonstrated exactly what happens when adversaries penetrate communication infrastructure. Chinese state-sponsored actors reportedly compromised at least nine major U.S. telecommunications providers, accessing metadata from 1M+ users and potentially recording calls of high-ranking government officials. These are the kinds of risks organizations have to accept when they operate on infrastructure they don’t control.

Coalition Operations and NATO Interoperability Challenges

Coalition operations compound these challenges. During the 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s deployment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) eastern flank following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, commanders struggled to digitally integrate with Romanian, Hungarian, and Slovak units due to incompatible communication systems and data classification protocols. Challenges ranged from differences in communication networks to issues with secure information-sharing; all critical requirements in multinational operations where delays in information sharing directly impact joint decision-making.

Intelligence Agency Requirements

Intelligence agencies face even stricter constraints, considering the importance of protecting intelligence sources and methods. Traditional cloud collaboration tools create unacceptable exposure: metadata about the “who,” “where,” “when,” and “what” of communications becomes accessible to all platform operators. The Congressional Research Service noted that the Salt Typhoon hackers specifically targeted systems used to fulfill court-authorized wiretapping requests, accessing the very infrastructure designed to be most secure. Sovereign deployment ensures intelligence workflows never touch vendor-controlled infrastructure that could be compromised or subpoenaed.

Security Operations Center (SOC) Needs

Security operations centers (SOCs) coordinating incident response face a different calculus, as the House Committee on Homeland Security reported that ~70% of all cyberattacks in 2024 involved critical infrastructure…and the average cost of a data breach in the U.S. reached $10 million in 2025.

Security professionals managing breach response across organizational boundaries can’t wait for legal teams to negotiate data-sharing agreements with cloud providers. They need platforms that maintain trust boundaries without sacrificing operational tempo.

Critical Infrastructure Compliance

Critical infrastructure operators face regulatory requirements that often conflict with commercial cloud architecture. For instance, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) standards require internal network security monitoring for high-impact bulk electric system cyber assets, with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approving CIP-015-1 in June 2025. Power utilities, water systems, and transportation networks increasingly need data sovereignty controls that traditional software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms cannot satisfy without fundamental architectural changes.

The Multinational Coordination Problem

Where sovereignty gets particularly interesting for DISC leaders is in cross-border operations, as the World Economic Forum notes that countries are taking increasingly divergent approaches to digital sovereignty, creating what they call “fragmentation of technological ecosystems.” The EU emphasizes privacy rights and strict data transfer controls. China mandates data localization and government oversight. The United States maintains broad surveillance authorities under the CLOUD Act.

Traditional cloud platforms force you to navigate these conflicts by choosing a provider’s home jurisdiction, which means choosing which country’s laws will govern your operations by default. That’s a problem when you’re coordinating with NATO allies, sharing intelligence with Five Eyes partners, or collaborating with private sector entities across multiple continents.

Sovereign collaboration is the ability to create secure shared workspaces across organizational boundaries without exposing internal systems or violating data sovereignty requirements. Each organization maintains control over their own infrastructure and data while synchronizing discussions, file sharing, and workflow automation through carefully controlled channels. This is what Mattermost calls “interoperable mission-partner collaboration.”

Technical Requirements for Sovereign Collaboration

If this sounds complicated from a technical standpoint, that’s because it is. Effective sovereign collaboration requires a platform with several specific capabilities:

Self-hosted deployment options that work across public, private, and sovereign cloud environments
Kubernetes-based architecture that scales from small teams to enterprise deployments without performance degradation
Role-based access controls to enforce organizational boundaries even in shared workspaces
Integration with existing identity management systems through SSO, AD/LDAP, and MFA
Audit logging that provides complete visibility into who accessed what, when, and from where

The platform also needs to be extensible so it can meet the needs of teams that have a large list of tools that are essential to their operations. Sovereign collaboration means bringing that entire suite of tools together under unified governance that respects data sovereignty requirements while maintaining operational efficiency.

How to Evaluate Sovereign Collaboration for Your Organization

If you’re evaluating whether sovereign collaboration makes sense for your organization, start by mapping your current data flows by answering the following foundational questions:

Where is sensitive information created?
Where does it get processed?
Where is it stored?
Who has administrative access?
Which jurisdictions have legal authority over those systems?

Then ask the harder questions…

If your primary cloud provider received a foreign government subpoena tomorrow, what data would they be legally compelled to turn over?
If geopolitical tensions escalated and cross-border data transfers were restricted, could your operations continue?
If a compliance audit demanded proof that EU citizens’ data never touched US servers, could you provide it?

For most DISC organizations, the answers to those questions reveal gaps that sovereign collaboration is designed to fill. Instead of abandoning cloud infrastructure in favor of a 100% on-premises solution, sovereign collaboration is about taking control of the infrastructure you use, regardless of where it’s deployed.

The Future of Sovereign Collaboration in Defense and Intelligence

The regulatory environment is only going to get tighter, as GDPR enforcement continues to intensify and 2025 brought mandatory data sovereignty clauses into cloud contracts and accelerated breach reporting requirements. Other jurisdictions are following the EU’s lead, implementing their own frameworks with equally strict penalties for non-compliance.

Sovereign collaboration isn’t about building walls around data; it’s about building operational resilience that survives regulatory changes, geopolitical shifts, and evolving threat landscapes. For DISC leaders navigating these challenges, understanding what true sovereignty looks like in practice is the first step toward building that resilience into your operations.

Frequently Asked Questions About Sovereign Collaboration

What is the difference between data sovereignty and sovereign collaboration?

Data sovereignty refers to keeping data within geographic borders and complying with local laws. Sovereign collaboration extends this concept to enable secure cross-border teamwork while maintaining full control over data, infrastructure, and compliance—regardless of where systems are deployed.

Is sovereign collaboration required for defense contractors?

While not universally mandated, defense contractors increasingly need sovereign collaboration capabilities to meet DoD security requirements, protect controlled unclassified information (CUI), and collaborate with coalition partners across different classification levels.

How does sovereign collaboration differ from traditional cloud platforms?

Traditional cloud platforms store your data on vendor-controlled infrastructure, subjecting it to the provider’s home jurisdiction laws (like the U.S. CLOUD Act). Sovereign collaboration platforms let you self-host on your own infrastructure, maintaining complete control over data location, access, and compliance.

What are the main benefits of sovereign collaboration for intelligence agencies?

Intelligence agencies gain protection for sources and methods, elimination of metadata exposure to platform operators, ability to operate in air-gapped environments, and assurance that communications never touch vendor infrastructure that could be compromised or subpoenaed.