Partners chasing their next major revenue stream may not need to look any further than data sovereignty, with new Everpure research revealing Australian enterprises are willing to sacrifice advanced features and functionality to work with sovereign providers.
According to Everpure’s Global Data Sovereignty Report 2026, 83 per cent of Australian enterprise C-suite leaders are willing to give up advanced product features and functionality to work with a local or sovereign provider.
Conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne, the survey of 2100 leaders from eight countries contained 300 respondents in Australia.
Speaking to ARN, Everpure Asia Pacific and Japan CTO and vice president Matthew Oostveen said the technology industry has focused on ease of access over functionality for some time, but this mentality has applied to sovereignty only recently.
“If you’ve been in tech long enough, there’s two words that will disrupt, and that’s ‘good enough’,” he said.
“We’re at the point, from a sovereignty perspective, to say, ‘features, functionalities and additions are nice to have, but what I want to focus on is my minimum viable company. That means I need to deliver these things, and it needs to be sovereign.
“Aussie SIs [systems integrators] and cloud service providers are well placed. They’re going to continue to innovate anyway, increase their features and functionality, and they’ve probably got wonderful roadmaps in place that say we’ll get there in a year or two and have these extra things available.”
This is a sentiment shared by Everpure Australia and New Zealand area vice president Altay Ayyuce, who said the observation moves past analysis and into practicality.
“I’ve seen an increase in number of partners — our MSP partners especially — chasing that sovereign dollar,” he said.
Oostveen also said there’s an opportunity for partners to close the sovereignty gap, which the report identified as being between executive recognition of risk and operational readiness.
“Sovereign is about ownership structure, and then the capability to deliver that with the services that you have,” he noted. “How sovereign can someone be is dependent on the capability of these local providers.
“We see in the research that there is a gap, and that they don’t have everything that hyperscalers might have, then there are gaps that need to be closed.
“If I can’t go with one of these large international suppliers, can I go with one locally, or do I need to go to a couple of them in order to provide that capability? That’s where we are at the moment; I need to shake hands, maybe with one or two other companies to get the completeness of vision.”
The report also found 38 per cent of Australian respondents are limiting their use of software-as-a-service providers that rely on non-domestic infrastructure.
The vast majority, at 85 per cent, see data sovereignty as a business concern, with 88 per cent believing a data sovereignty-related failure could result in them being fired.
However, 66 per cent lack full visibility into who can access, control, and manage their data, and 62 per cent don’t have any plans to mitigate geopolitical data exfiltration or service disruption. Despite this, only 10 per cent noted exfiltration data access protection as being a top priority.
Sasha Karen attended Everpure Accelerate in Melbourne as a guest of Everpure.