Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Three days of ideas, innovation, and inspiration: this year’s Smart Country Convention (SCCON) once again brought together public sector leaders, tech innovators, and policymakers in Berlin to shape the digital transformation of governments and public services.

At this year’s Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, Wire hosted a high-level panel on Britain’s digital future, exploring how the UK and Europe can strengthen digital sovereignty and resilience in a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. The session, chaired by Jon Craig, Chief Political Correspondent at Sky News, brought together Alex Barros-Curtis MP, Al Carns MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, and Oliver Brown, Vice President Commercial at Wire.

The annual awards, organized by Computing Security Magazine, celebrate the companies, products, and services that protect the digital infrastructure of organizations worldwide. Since 2010, the event has become a benchmark for cybersecurity innovation, highlighting the teams that push the boundaries of trust, encryption, and compliance.

The collaboration combines Apostrophy’s sovereign smartphone environment, uniting audited hardware, a privacy-first OS, and a managed ecosystem, with Wire’s BSI-approved, end-to-end encrypted collaboration suite trusted by governments, critical infrastructure, and enterprises worldwide. The joint solution is designed for organizations that demand the highest levels of security, compliance, and control, including the public sector, healthcare, finance, and other privacy-sensitive industries.

A recent security incident has raised serious concerns across the IT industry. Firewall vendor SonicWall confirmed that all cloud backups of its customers’ firewalls were stolen in a large scale breach. What was initially described as a limited issue has now turned into a data leak affecting every organization that used SonicWall’s cloud backup service.

In the new digital economy, data is power. Questions about who controls, processes, and protects it now sit at the center of political and corporate priorities. The year 2025 marks a turning point in Europe’s pursuit of digital sovereignty, driven by tighter regulation and growing geopolitical tension. For enterprises within the EU, digital sovereignty has become a strategic requirement for sustainable growth in an increasingly regulated environment.

US based hyperscalers continue to dominate digital infrastructure worldwide. Yet across Europe, there is a growing movement to protect data from both cyber threats and extraterritorial laws, and to ensure full regulatory compliance. Cloud sovereignty has become a cornerstone of this effort. Cloud sovereignty ensures that data, workloads, operations, and digital infrastructure remain under the jurisdictional control of the country or region where they reside. It goes beyond simple data residency.

The Commission’s compliance is not just a Microsoft win—it’s a signal to all European institutions and businesses. To meet EU rules, the Commission had to enforce strict limits on data transfers, improve contractual safeguards, and guarantee that data processing takes place within the European Economic Area wherever possible.

Microsoft’s forced unbundling of Teams in the EU is more than an antitrust event. It's a reminder that enterprises must carefully deconstruct how they build dependence on platforms that mix sensitive and non-sensitive workloads, especially those outside sovereign control. The key lesson: separating sensitive from public-facing communications, and sovereign from non-sovereign platforms, is now a strategic imperative.