Guardtime’s Head of Strategy Luukas Ilves and Senior Policy Officer Anna-Maria Osula have published an article on “The Technological Sovereignty Dilemma – and How New Technology Can Offer a Way Out” in the newest issue of the European Cybersecurity Journal. 

Our experts look at why governments are pulling the handbrake on technologies like 5G, cloud and AI out of concern for “digital sovereignty” – real distress that they can no longer control their own core tech. Their paper builds on previous Guardtime R&D work, including verifiable AI and Secure 5G, and our contributions to industry papers. 

Anna-Maria and Luukas argue that new technologies can overcome digital sovereignty concerns. To do so, we need “autonomy by design”, which relies on three fundamental functionalities – scalable data and process integrity, automated testing, and transparency. Only by deploying these can governments and critical companies realize functional control of their rapidly evolving, software-defined tech stacks.

This article was written in January, before COVID-19 erupted into a global emergency. But it has only become more timely: COVID-19 and its aftermath – work-from-home, distancing, physical supply-chain interruptions – have thrown corporations and governments into the deep end of the pool when it comes to digitalisation.

Governments and essential services with critical data now have to answer the question: how do we do digital transformation FAST, while taking into account all the rules we have on data protection, national security etc? And how do we work together, share data and figure out a collective global response without putting all our personal and sensitive data in the wrong hands? 

The notion of “autonomy by design” laid out in this article is an urgent part of the answer. While this is not about any specific product or company, Anna-Maria and Luukas derive inspiration from Guardtime’s work on cloud, 5G and AI security. 

Read the full article here