“One of the advantages partners have is the close relationships with their customers, often as the trusted advisor,” he said. “They have the capacity to heavily influence the thinking and the direction that their customers take. “This applies particularly for the SME sectors, where their customers often don’t have a big legal or compliance department or a chief data officer. But they are just as impacted by data sovereignty as larger companies.”Data sovereignty is being forged in the crucible of these three very firm forces that are pushing down on it at the moment. “We can acknowledge that data now sits in so many different locations — there’s a lot in the data centre.