IDC's Worldwide Sovereign Cloud Taxonomy, 2024

This IDC Taxonomy is an update to IDC's Worldwide Digital Sovereignty Taxonomy, 2023: Cloud Sovereignty (IDC #EUR150601123, May 2023). While this version remains largely consistent with its predecessor, the main change is the addition of software for data back-up and recovery as part of systems infrastructure software, which falls within the primary market segment of technical sovereignty. Because this taxonomy provides a description of the sovereign cloud market, the term "sovereign cloud" is now more generally used by IDC in place of digital sovereignty, unless the wider concept of digital sovereignty is being discussed and context dictates otherwise. This taxonomy serves as the foundation for classifying and sizing the worldwide sovereign cloud market. It includes 20 individual functional markets grouped within a hierarchy of nine secondary markets, which in turn aggregate into three primary segments: data sovereignty, technical sovereignty, and operational sovereignty."During the past couple of years or so, we've seen cloud providers working to define digital sovereignty and then develop their sovereign cloud solutions," said Rahiel Nasir, research director and lead analyst, IDC's Digital Sovereignty research program. "As they now start to deliver those solutions and users begin to deploy them, we expect the market to move into the crucial phase of seeing how sovereign cloud can be made to work in the real world, and how solutions will evolve to adapt to practical needs."