Who Controls Your Data in a Sovereign AI World With NetApp

Could your board explain where the organization's most valuable data resides, who can control it, and how quickly it could be recovered

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Adam Gale, CTO for Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence at NetApp, about why digital sovereignty is moving from compliance teams into boardroom discussions.

Adam argues that data has measurable business value, so decisions about its location, ownership, protection, and recoverability should be treated with the same seriousness as other financial risks.

We discuss how the US CLOUD Act, Europe's sovereignty agenda, and wider geopolitical tensions are changing cloud decisions. Adam explains that sovereignty extends beyond physical data location.

Hardware supply chains, software development, labor, access, operational control, and recovery all influence the level of sovereignty an organization may require. His advice is to treat sovereignty as a scale rather than impose the same controls on every workload.

The conversation also turns to sovereign AI. Adam describes why businesses and governments want greater control over training data, intellectual property, model activity, and audit records. He explains how poisoned data can produce plausible but unsafe outputs, and why controlled AI environments, traceable logs, and immutable records matter when systems begin making consequential decisions.

We then connect data visibility with business value. Adam shares how uncertainty over data location can affect a company acquisition and explains why insurers increasingly ask organizations to prove how information is protected and recovered.

He also describes the growing role of behavior analytics, automated responses, immutable storage, and storage-level ransomware protection in limiting damage and restoring trusted data.

If digital sovereignty begins with responsibility, control, and security, who owns those decisions in your organization today?

Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts with me.