How CISOs can manage sovereign-cloud security risks
How CISOs can manage sovereign-cloud security risks
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/how-cisos-can-manage-sovereign-cloud-security-risks/821323/
Publish Date: 2026-05-28 11:05:00
Source Domain: www.cybersecuritydive.com
As geopolitical tensions rise, organizations face new challenges for protecting their data in the cloud: shifting regulations and increased cyber risk. That means, in some cases, evaluating alternatives to major U.S.-headquartered cloud providers.
While use of a sovereign local or regional cloud provider reduces certain geopolitical risks, CISOs must consider the security challenges they pose on both sides of the shared responsibility model. Cloud providers under pressure to offer cloud sovereignty often do so at the expense of other business and technical capabilities. They typically have weaker security for their cloud infrastructure than hyperscale providers, often lacking native governance, resilience and security features and a third-party ecosystem to augment security controls.
CISOs, then, must ensure that their cloud workload placement appropriately restricts use of these alternative providers by focusing on security of the cloud and security in the cloud.
Ensuring cloud security
A cloud provider must secure its data center facilities, hardware, software and services. And it must defend itself against external cyber threats as well as have strong defenses against malicious insiders, because nation-states threat actors can place operatives within a cloud provider for espionage or cyber warfare purposes.
While many alternative cloud providers hold ISO 27001 certifications, that only certifies that the provider has made a good-faith attempt at security. It does not certify the actual security controls the provider employs to secure their environment.
To that end, CISOs should not treat ISO 27001, Germany’s BSI C5 Type 1 audit or similar audits as any guarantee of adequate security of the cloud — especially if the certification is not paired with a controls audit (such as BSI C5 Type 2).
Besides considering audit certifications when choosing an alternative cloud provider, CISOs also should…
