As you know, Red Hat’s push for sovereign cloud is not a recent development. For quite some time, customers have been building their hybrid and sovereign cloud environments with us. The drivers are many, ranging from data privacy and geopolitical resilience to cost efficiency and competitive advantage, with more emerging as the landscape evolves.  

The Nayara incident underscored a key reality: digital sovereignty is no longer just a concept; it’s operationally essential for industries that underpin the nation. 

At Red Hat, we tackle this challenge in two ways. First, we provide an open hybrid cloud foundation that gives organisations control over where and how data and workloads run. Second, we collaborate with partners and customers to design sovereign deployments that meet regulatory, operational, and continuity requirements. 

Our open-hybrid approach, powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat OpenShift, and a rich partner ecosystem, helps governments, PSUs, and regulated industries retain control over sensitive data, strengthen resilience, and avoid the pitfalls of single-vendor dependency. Simply put: we make sovereignty practical, flexible, and future-ready.

Policy should focus on outcomes—resilience, data control, and continuity, while leaving flexibility in how organisations achieve them. Mandates make sense when national security or public safety is at stake, but they work best when they encourage open standards, portability, and a healthy partner ecosystem. 

That’s why open-hybrid models are so compelling. They deliver sovereign outcomes—data residency, supply-chain control, auditability, while preserving agility and room to innovate. At Red Hat, our approach empowers organisations to meet policy goals without sacrificing modern application patterns or flexibility. Sovereignty, after all, shouldn’t come at the cost of innovation. 

We believe digital sovereignty impacts how companies approach data, technology, operational, and assurance requirements. Red Hat Sovereign Cloud is designed to address concerns in these four key areas: 

Data sovereignty: The right and ability of a nation or organization to control its data involves localization, governance, and protection and privacy considerations.

Technology sovereignty: Running workloads without dependence on a provider’s infrastructure provides security assurance, software sovereignty, and technology independence.

Operational sovereignty: Maintaining control over standards, processes, and policies gives organizations the transparency and auditability needed to manage infrastructure.

Assurance sovereignty: Verifying the integrity, security, and reliability of digital systems is vital to service continuity, data protection, and resilience.

In the last five years, India has leapfrogged many mature markets in cloud adoption — thanks to bold public sector programmes, a vibrant digital services economy, and an enterprise sector hungry for scale. AI, however, is at an earlier stage: we’re still building the muscle for governance, lifecycle operations, and production-grade model management. 

For CIOs, the golden rule is simple: treat AI like any other mission-critical workload. That means clear SLAs, reproducible pipelines, robust observability, and responsible governance baked in from day one.

The smart approach is hybrid by design — keeping sensitive workloads on-prem or in sovereign clouds, while tapping public clouds for burst capacity or specialised managed services. With platforms like Red Hat OpenShift AI and RHEL AI, organisations can operationalise AI across hybrid environments—driving innovation at pace, but with the guardrails needed for sustainability and scale.

Cloud-native skills—Kubernetes, containers, secure DevOps—are in high demand, and India is no exception. The challenge isn’t just finding experts; it’s building a pipeline that grows talent internally. Structured hiring for aptitude, role-based training, certifications, and partnerships with learning providers are critical. 

Red Hat invests heavily here: hands-on training, Red Hat OpenShift and cloud-native developer certifications, academy programmes, and partner enablement—all designed to scale skills, not just hire externally. Enterprises should foster a culture of journey-based engagement—aligning the workforce to a shared purpose—while prioritizing on-the-job learning, certification paths, and career progression tied to cloud-native competencies to retain talent.

For nearly three decades, Red Hat has helped our customers and partners harness the power of open source innovation for mission-critical systems. It started with Linux, evolved to encompass hybrid cloud, Kubernetes, and virtualization, and now AI is the next frontier facing IT leaders. 

For our customers and enterprises, moving workloads to the cloud was only the first step. The next significant shift we are witnessing is the deployment of AI-powered, distributed applications across secure, hybrid environments, featuring robust AI lifecycle management and resilient infrastructure for critical services. 

Enterprises will need consistent platforms that support modernization: microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, robust automation, and ML/LLM lifecycle tooling. Red Hat is positioning itself by extending Red Hat OpenShift and RHEL into AI (Red Hat OpenShift AI, RHEL AI), enabling deployments from edge to mainframe, and nurturing an open ecosystem so customers can build best-of-breed solutions without losing control or portability. Our approach is practical: reduce operational risk, accelerate developer productivity, and make AI and cloud-native patterns sustainable at enterprise scale.

Ultimately, one thing that IT decision-makers have in common when they need to leap from today to the future is the need for openness in technology and trust in their partners, which puts them in a position to succeed. And this is precisely what Red Hat has done in our past, is doing today, and will continue to do in the future. We strongly believe that open source is here to unlock the world’s potential.