Executives fear data sovereignty failures, but 64% have no plan

A new global survey says senior leaders take data sovereignty personally: 88% believe a sovereignty failure could cost them their job. Yet 64% of their organisations have no formal sovereignty strategy, and 62% lack full visibility into who can access and manage their data.

The Global Data Sovereignty Report 2026 was commissioned by Everpure (the storage company formerly known as Pure Storage) and run by Vanson Bourne, which surveyed 2,100 C-suite and IT leaders at large enterprises in June 2026 across Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and India.

Buying behaviour is already shifting. 40% say they are actively limiting SaaS platforms that rely on non-domestic hosting, 85% would give up advanced features to work with a sovereign cloud provider, and 92% expect local or sovereign clouds to become the default for sensitive workloads within three years. Regional differences are wide: 44% of Indian organisations treat sovereignty as a significant factor in vendor selection, against 16% in Australia.

Note that the study was commissioned by a vendor that sells data management products, which the same announcement promoted.