Digital Sovereignty: Control Over Data and Platforms Has Become a Matter of National Security
Proprietary data storage systems, digital platforms and artificial intelligence development are important areas for every country. On October 10, Maxim Oreshkin, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of the Russian Federation, discussed Russia’s work in these fields and what it is prepared to share with partners in a lecture titled “Sovereignty in the Modern Digital World,” delivered as part of the business program of the Second Global Digital Forum.
Control over traditional sectors is no longer enough to guarantee a country’s full independence. Digital technologies are playing an increasingly important role, influencing the real economy, everyday life and how citizens interact with businesses and the government.
“We are all familiar with the traditional concept of sovereignty. For many years, we have talked about food security, energy security and the availability of essential infrastructure, including infrastructure for foreign trade … But in today’s world, controlling only the physical side of things is no longer enough to achieve genuine sovereignty,” Maxim Oreshkin emphasized.
Those who control technologies and infrastructure and set the rules for the digital environment can influence not just individual processes, but entire industries and government functions. That is why the ability to manage data independently and develop key technologies has become essential to national resilience.
Today, digital sovereignty can be divided into three levels. The lowest level is complete dependence on foreign solutions. The basic level means independently managing systems built on foreign platforms. The advanced level involves developing a country’s own solutions and platforms.
The key areas for developing digital sovereignty today include communications, artificial intelligence, urban services, trade, payments, education, health care, public administration and cybersecurity. Russia has already made significant progress in each of these areas. It has its own communication services, messaging apps and search engines. Russia’s GigaChat and Alice AI models, developed by Sber and Yandex, respectively, were built entirely by Russian professionals and rank among the world’s leading solutions in this field. Both Sber and Yandex already work with other countries and train their models on local content.
Platform-based solutions are also becoming increasingly important across sectors and are reshaping the economy. These platforms concentrate enormous financial resources as well as large volumes of sensitive data. Uber, for example, knows more about people’s movements than city authorities do, yet this information is processed on servers in a third country.
“All this information becomes available to intelligence services in the blink of an eye. There is another risk, too: these mobility services do not run on your infrastructure or on infrastructure located in your country, where it could be protected against cyberattacks. At any moment, taxis, public transportation and other mobility services could simply stop working, again at the decision of people in a third country,” Maxim Oreshkin said, describing the problem.
Similar risks exist in trade, education, health care, government services and other sectors that rely on foreign platforms.
Russia has experience building its own platforms in virtually all these areas. It has also developed substantial cybersecurity capabilities that enable secure data exchange between government services and agencies. As Maxim Oreshkin emphasized, Russia is ready to share its expertise with partners and help other countries build sovereign digital platforms.
