System Sovereignty in a Software-Defined World: Who really owns your technology?

Imagine you’ve just bought a new fridge — a smart fridge, naturally. It keeps your food cold, alerts you when you’re low on milk, and even tracks energy use. Life is good.

Then, a few months later, something changes. Each time you open the door, the screen flashes an ad — maybe for a new yogurt brand or a meal kit subscription. You start to wonder: is my fridge watching me?

It sounds absurd — but it’s real. Samsung recently confirmed that their smart fridges will begin displaying ads. And if your fridge knows what you buy, how often you open the door, and what brands you prefer, that data can be analyzed, shared, or sold — all without your explicit consent. What was once your appliance quietly becomes part of someone else’s business model.

That’s the deeper issue: a loss of agency over the systems you depend on. Who truly owns your technology — you, or vendors behind it?

Connected devices, cloud services, and artificial intelligence all bring extraordinary benefits, but often at the cost of transparency and control.

Send data to an AI service? It may be used to train future models.

Use the cloud for operations? Your usage patterns are likely being studied.

Connect everyday devices? They may be quietly reporting back to manufacturers or advertisers.

At CUBE, we’ve been thinking about digital sovereignty since our founding in 2010. Our work sits at the intersection of connected devices, cloud infrastructure, and advanced algorithms — including AI. We believe technology should serve you, not the other way around.

That’s why CUBE offers a spectrum of sovereign solutions:

Want to run AI on your data without sending it to external vendors like OpenAI? We can do that.

Want cloud flexibility but full control over where your servers live — even in your own data centers? No problem.

Want the lowest-cost cloud now, with a future path to full sovereignty later? Also no problem.

Wherever you sit on the sovereignty spectrum — from convenience to complete control — CUBE can help you regain and retain agency over your technology, ensuring it serves your business interests today and into the future.