Red Hat Releases Open Source Tool to Help Organizations Measure Digital Sovereignty
Red Hat Releases Open Source Tool to Help Organizations Measure Digital Sovereignty
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Red Hat Releases Open Source Tool to Help Organizations Measure Digital Sovereignty
As geopolitical tensions between the United States and Europe continue to reshape the technology landscape, Red Hat has launched the Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment, a free, open source tool designed to help organizations objectively measure how much control they have over their own data, infrastructure, and IT operations.
A Response to Growing Cloud Anxiety
Digital sovereignty has become one of the defining technology policy issues in Europe this decade. The concern has evolved well beyond data privacy — which was first codified in the EU’s GDPR — to encompass entire IT infrastructures, as European governments and enterprises grow increasingly wary of deep reliance on hardware and software from suppliers based in the United States, China, and elsewhere.
Research from Gartner shows that European spending on digital sovereignty is expected to reach $12.6 billion by 2026, reflecting the urgency with which organizations are now approaching the issue.
Red Hat, which earlier this year launched its Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support program to help European customers meet regulatory and operational independence requirements, is now going further with a self-service assessment tool that any organization can use — free of charge.
What the Tool Does
The Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment is a self-service web tool that covers seven domains: Data Sovereignty, Technical Sovereignty, Operational Sovereignty, Assurance Sovereignty, Open Source Strategy, Executive Oversight, and Managed Services. It presents 21 questions, takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete, and scores respondents across a four-level maturity scale: Foundation, Developing, Strategic, and Advanced.
The Foundation level represents the early phase in which sovereignty requirements are being identified. Developing means that capabilities are being actively built. Strategic indicates strong, repeatable capabilities in most domains. Advanced represents proactive control over the entire digital estate.
Sample questions in the assessment include prompts such as “Can you migrate critical applications to different cloud platforms within a reasonable timeframe if necessary?” and “Do you have control over where your security and audit logs are stored?” After completion, the tool provides a practical step-by-step plan with improvement actions and research questions for stakeholders.
Open Source and Privacy-Preserving by Design
The tool is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is available on GitHub. It is maintained by Red Hat’s Community of Practice and is designed to be vendor-neutral, making it useful to any organization regardless of what technology stack they run. All assessment data stays in the browser and is never sent to Red Hat or any third party.
The source code and evaluation criteria were originally developed by Red Hat’s Chris Jenkins and are publicly available on GitHub. Organizations are free to use them as an open standard for evaluating digital sovereignty.
By releasing the methodology openly, Red Hat is positioning the framework as a potential industry standard — one that competitors, partners, and end users can freely adopt, extend, or fork. The company argues that when assessment tools are proprietary, they risk becoming the very “black boxes” they are meant to audit, and that true independence cannot be secretly verified.
A Competitive Market
Red Hat is not alone in this space. SUSE, a European-born Linux vendor, launched its own Sovereign Premium Support offering in July 2025, helping customers address regulatory requirements and meet digital sovereignty needs — and has been marketing digital sovereignty as a product longer than Red Hat. The distinction Red Hat is emphasizing with this new tool is transparency: by open-sourcing the assessment criteria itself, the company is inviting external scrutiny in a field often dominated by opaque consulting methodologies.
It is worth noting that Red Hat itself acknowledges the tool is not a compliance checker. As FOSS Force reported, the tool is not designed to assess whether a company’s infrastructure and data handling meets specific regulations, whether in the EU, US, or anywhere else — a point Red Hat makes explicitly in its own disclaimer.
Getting Started
The Digital Sovereignty Readiness Assessment is available now as a free web-based tool. Organizations that prefer greater control can download the source code from GitHub and run the assessment on their own servers. The assessment takes approximately 10–15 minutes to complete and requires no registration or data submission.
