The MonkCast
The MonkCast

The Digital Sovereignty Questions Every Enterprise Should Be Asking with Jason Willeford

25 August 2026 34:54 RedMonk

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About this episode

James Governor sits down with Jason Willeford, Global Lead for Secure Global Support at Red Hat, to dig into digital sovereignty and why it's become such a big deal for European enterprises. Jason explains Red Hat's Confirmed Sovereign Support, launched last year, which keeps EU customer data and the engineers handling it inside the EU. They cover what sovereignty actually means, why banks and telcos now care about it as much as public sector agencies do, and how AI complicates the picture when you don't know where a model was trained or what data it consumed on the way there. The conversation also touches on IBM's Sovereign Core, Project Lightwell, and RHEL for SAP.

This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Red Hat.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/jason-willeford/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Digital Sovereignty

02:26 Understanding Sovereignty: Definitions and Spectrum

05:31 The Complexity of Sovereignty in Europe

08:21 Data Sovereignty and Support Models

11:28 AI Sovereignty and Its Implications

14:15 Operational Sovereignty and Customer Engagement

17:20 The Role of Red Hat in Sovereignty

20:40 Sovereign Core and Global Expansion

23:36 Mindset Shift Towards Sovereignty

26:22 Engaging Developers and Enterprises on Sovereignty

29:36 The Future of Sovereignty and Open Source

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