There's a familiar ritual in enterprise budget season. Someone proposes sovereign infrastructure data, keys, and processing kept within defined jurisdictional or organizational boundaries and someone else asks the obvious question: what does this cost us that we wouldn't otherwise spend? The answer is never small, and it's rarely popular.
“Let's not pretend the costs aren't real,” says Dr. Naveen Singh, Co-founder of Inery. “You're running duplicated systems across regions instead of one centralized stack. You're investing in sovereign key management, often through hardware security modules or dedicated key custodians. You're absorbing the overhead of parallel environments and region-specific compliance tooling. For a skeptical CEO, that looks exactly like what it sounds like: paying more to do the same thing you were already doing, with extra steps.”
It's a fair complaint, Dr Singh says as far as it goes. “If sovereignty were purely defensive, a box checking exercise for regulators, that skepticism would be entirely reasonable. The problem is the question everyone's asking is the wrong one.”
The Wrong Baseline
“The question people ask is, ‘what would this cost if we didn't do it?’” Dr Singh says. “That's a defensive framing, and it only ever produces a negative number. The more useful question is what the investment returns.”
That reframing shows up in the data, he argues. Organizations that treat sovereignty as a strategic line item dedicated budget, clear ownership, defined architectural standards report a 71% positive impact on innovation capability. “That's not a marginal improvement. That's a signal that the discipline required to build sovereign infrastructure correctly produces capabilities that extend well past compliance.”
What Sovereign Architecture Actually Forces You to Do
Pressed on the mechanism, Dr Singh breaks it into effects he's watched play out repeatedly.
It forces modularity and Maersk is the cautionary tale. “You cannot build a sovereign system on a single monolithic dependency. Decentralized architecture, by necessity, breaks systems into independently operable components.” Dr Singh points to Maersk's 2017 collision with the NotPetya malware as proof of what happens without that discipline. The shipping giant ran roughly 150 domain controllers built to sync with one another a setup that looked decentralized but wasn't. NotPetya wiped nearly all of them within minutes, because they were synchronized copies of the same thing rather than independent systems. Maersk's recovery hinged on a single surviving machine in a Ghana office, spared only because a power outage had it offline during the attack; rebuilding from it took well over a week and hundreds of millions of dollars. “Replication isn't modularity,” Dr Singh says. “If every node holds an identical copy, you don't have independence you have one system wearing a hundred fifty masks, and it fails as one. Real modularity means a compromise in one segment can't cascade into the rest, by architecture, not by luck. Maersk got lucky. Most organizations don't.”
It forces ownership clarity. “Sovereign key management requires knowing precisely who controls what, under what conditions. Teams that know exactly what they're allowed to build with move faster than teams still waiting on a legal opinion.”
It forces resilience by design. “An organization that's already solved for regional independence has, as a byproduct, solved for a wide class of outage and disaster-recovery scenarios that would otherwise be a separate, unfunded initiative.”
It turns trust into a product feature. “In financial services, healthcare, and public infrastructure especially, customers increasingly ask where their data lives and who can access it. Organizations that can answer confidently win deals the ones still consolidating everything into a single provider can't even bid on.”
The Data Was Always Worth More Than the Bill
Dr Singh returns often to a comparison most boards skip: sovereignty's cost against what's actually being protected, not against zero. “What a pharmaceutical company spends on sovereign infrastructure over a decade is a rounding error next to the value of a single successful drug pipeline. What a government spends securing citizen data over decades is nothing next to what that data is worth to an adversary, or to the public trust that collapses the day it leaks.”
He points to the scramble around COVID-19 vaccine research as the clearest recent proof. During 2020 and 2021, state-backed hacking groups tied to North Korea, Russia, and other nations went after vaccine developers directly AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech among them and succeeded in extracting and leaking regulatory documents tied to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. “Nation-states were actively trying to steal that research in the middle of a pandemic, because a shortcut to it was worth more than almost anything else on the table,” Dr Singh says. “That's the asset class we're protecting. The sovereignty conversation isn't about a database. It's about the thing every adversary already knows is priceless.”
Reframing the ROI Conversation
Dr Singh suggests three categories instead of one undifferentiated cost. “Direct cost the incremental spend on duplicated infrastructure and key management. Real, measurable, front-loaded, and the part everyone stops at. Avoided cost the fines and remediation from sovereignty failures, rare but severe enough that one incident can outweigh years of spend. And compounding return the innovation capacity that modularity, ownership clarity, and resilience unlock, which keeps paying long after the build-out. Most conversations stop at the first category. The organizations reporting that 71% innovation lift are the ones measuring the third.”
What “Held to Ransom” Actually Costs
“Compare it to the alternative honestly,” Dr Singh says. “The alternative isn't ‘no cost.’ It's being locked out of your own systems and negotiating with criminals for the privilege of getting your data back.”
The numbers back him up. Colonial Pipeline paid $4.4 million in cryptocurrency in 2021 after a ransomware attack shut down the largest fuel pipeline on the US East Coast. Merck's 2017 encounter with NotPetya technically a wiper disguised as ransomware cost the pharmaceutical company an estimated $1.4 billion in damages and years of insurance litigation. And in 2024, Change Healthcare, a clearinghouse much of the US healthcare system relied on, paid roughly $22 million in bitcoin and didn't get its data back. The total cost of that single incident has since been reported north of $2 billion, with over 190 million people's records exposed, making it the largest healthcare data breach on record.
“None of those companies were asking whether sovereignty was worth it anymore,” Dr Singh says. “They were asking how fast they could wire millions to people who'd already proven they didn't need permission to take what they wanted.” He also notes that Change Healthcare's centralization was the root cause, not just the aggravating factor: “That's the modularity argument again, at national scale. When one system sits at the center of that much dependency, an attacker doesn't need to breach everyone. They need to breach one thing, once.”
The Boardroom Question
“Sovereignty is not free, and no honest analysis should claim otherwise,” Dr Singh says. But he pushes back on treating it as pure compliance overhead. “Organizations that fund sovereignty deliberately, rather than bolting it on after a regulator or a customer forces the issue, end up with architecture that's more modular, better governed, and more resilient. That's a return on investment, and it should be measured like one.”
His closing argument puts the real comparison side by side: “On one side, the decades-long cumulative cost of doing sovereignty properly. On the other, a single ransom payment made under duress, to someone who's already proven they can shut down your pipeline or your claims processing overnight with no guarantee they'll hand the data back once you've paid. Colonial Pipeline, Merck, Change Healthcare: none of those bills came close to what decades of sovereign infrastructure would have cost, and none of those companies got to choose the timing. The ransom is always due immediately. Sovereignty at least lets you pay on your own schedule, into your own capability, instead of into someone else's wallet. Nobody would seriously argue a drug pipeline or a government's citizen data is worth less than what it costs to secure over twenty years that's precisely why it's targeted. The cumulative cost of sovereignty isn't the number to be afraid of. It's the number that's actually affordable, next to what's genuinely at stake.”
Dr. Naveen Singh is the Co-founder of Inery, a decentralized database company focused on data sovereignty and interoperable infrastructure.
