From June 30 to July 1, 2026, the Salon Souveraineté Numérique returns to Paris at Espace Champerret. The goal is straightforward: bring together, over two days, key players in sovereign cloud, cybersecurity, AI, and open source with one concrete objective for SMEs and mid-market enterprises: find credible alternatives to host and protect their data without getting locked into technical dependency.
For business leaders, this is not theoretical. Between customer records, HR files, sensitive documents, and intellectual property, the question is no longer just “where do we store it?” but “who actually controls it?”
The SME Opportunity
This event can save a company serious time when the goal is to compare options properly. In two days, you can put vendors such as OVHcloud, Scaleway, Clever Cloud, Infomaniak, Exoscale, NumSpot, or NetExplorer head-to-head with major market standards like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
The business case is clear: build a shortlist of partners capable of hosting sensitive data in France, the EU, or Switzerland, with strong guarantees around security, data portability, and contractual control. It is also the right moment to discuss encryption, backups, data residency, and to identify sovereign AI building blocks for practical use cases: document search, internal copilots, internal RAG, and automation of repetitive tasks.
In practice, this kind of event helps you avoid spending six months doing blind benchmarking. You leave with contacts, migration paths, and ideally a real action plan.
The Watchouts
Still, be careful with the trade show effect: everyone sells “sovereign,” but not all clouds are created equal. The first trap is lock-in. If portability is unclear, if formats are closed, or if contracts make exit difficult, you are simply replacing one dependency with another.
The second trap is functional maturity. Some sovereign offerings are strong on hosting, but less advanced than hyperscalers when it comes to managed services, analytics, or AI. The result: more custom development, more integration work, and sometimes a final bill that is higher than expected.
Finally, look beyond the marketing. Who operates the cloud? Where is the parent company based? Which technologies are used? Without clear answers, “sovereign” can quickly become a vague catch-all term.
The Compliance Angle
This topic ties directly into GDPR, the Swiss nLPD for companies operating in Switzerland, and the future requirements of the AI Act if you deploy AI. Choosing a European or Swiss host is not enough: you also need to review subcontracting agreements, clauses covering transfers outside the EU, encryption measures, logging, backups, and available certifications.
For an SME, the right mindset is to treat the event as a starting point, not a legal sign-off. The real work starts afterward: data processing audits, DPA review, transfer risk analysis, and precise framing of AI use cases to avoid building on regulatory quicksand.
Conclusion & Cohesium Support
Sovereign Cloud 2026 can be a powerful accelerator, provided you go in with a clear direction. Without defined criteria, you quickly come back with brochures and promises. With the right methodology, it becomes a real lever for security, compliance, and lower operational risk.
Instead of improvising, Cohesium AI can prepare your visit with a scoping package: mapping of sensitive data, a shortlist of sovereign hosting providers, a technical and compliance evaluation grid, and a migration roadmap. And if you want to go further, we can also support you with workflow automation and the design of sovereign AI solutions adapted to your IT environment.