Talks about the country’s digital transformation efforts are no longer just about efficiency, but about sovereignty and resilience too. Digital sovereignty and data sovereignty were highlighted by policymakers and the private sector players EnterpriseAM spoke to as important concepts that go beyond just the building of data centers within the borders of the country.

Digital sovereignty isn’t just about where the data resides — it’s “the ability of an institution or the state to control its technological infrastructure and its own data and information,” former CIT Ministry Legislative Committee head and digital legislation consultant Mohamed Hegazy tells EnterpriseAM. IBM North and East Africa General Manager Marwa Abbas, in comments to EnterpriseAM, similarly described digital sovereignty as “the ability for organizations and nations to operate technology on their own terms — maintaining demonstrable control over data, infrastructure, and operations, regardless of where systems are physically located.”

Why this matters: “Egyptian national security is no longer confined to securing land, sea, and air borders. It has expanded to include virtual borders or what we know as cyberspace,” Supreme Cybersecurity Council consultant Waleed Haggag tells us. While the question of who controls the data may seem like a technicality, it can make private or public institutions “a hostage to foreign suppliers, platforms, or legislation, especially during critical times like wars and crises,” Hegazy tells us.

“Sovereignty helps ensure the uninterrupted operation of vital state facilities,” Haggag tells us, explaining how having data stored locally makes it “difficult for hostile entities to exploit vulnerabilities in international servers to reach us.” “This plays a pivotal role during geopolitical tensions that may lead to internet service cuts or restrictions by foreign powers,” he added.

Digital transformation is no longer defined by speed and efficiency alone — resilience is now a defining metric,” Abbas tells us. “Recent global disruptions, from large-scale outages to geopolitical instability, have demonstrated that digital infrastructure is now part of a nation’s critical fabric. When systems fail, the impact extends beyond IT to economies, public services, and public trust,” she explained.

Digital sovereignty is also about accountability, as having data based physically and statutorily in Egypt “ensures that any breach or leak falls under Egyptian […] jurisdiction” and means we don’t have to rely on “foreign entities that might procrastinate or refuse to cooperate,” Haggag says.

The National Cybersecurity Strategy has already made significant progress onshoring government data, with a host of new data centers — albeit limited in number and size when compared to our regional peers — that now host “all sensitive government databases within Egypt,” according to Haggag. Continuity of services is also a priority with “isolated sandboxes used to ensure that citizen services remain unaffected by outages or breaches in global commercial clouds.”

Vital sectors like water, electricity, and health have additional layers of protection, with the Supreme Cybersecurity Council mandating that the core operational technology networks for critical utilities be “completely isolated from the public internet and administrative networks,” Haggag tells us. Encryption and locally generated and managed keys are also mandated to prevent foreign manufacturers from having a backdoor.

Before anything’s connected, all imported hardware and software follow “strict requirements set for inspecting and testing,” Haggag says. This step is taken before introducing anything to critical infrastructure to ensure that the components are “free of pre-planted malicious code or electronic components that allow remote exploitation.”

But the problem is that “excessive legislative rigor can become an obstacle” to attracting global tech companies to Egypt, while on the flipside, “laxity can turn citizens' data into economic fuel for global companies without any return for the state,” according to Hegazy. Upcoming legislation on the topic “must achieve this balance by adopting and applying international standards rather than reinventing the [regulatory] wheel,” he added.

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