# Microsoft — Advancing digital sovereignty with greater control and choice

- Company: Microsoft (microsoft.com)
- Announced: 2026-10-20T17:34:47+00:00
- Category: capability-change
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: announcements
- Source: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/20/advancing-digital-sovereignty-with-greater-control-and-choice/
- Record: https://forck.live/items/25475-advancing-digital-sovereignty-with-greater-control-and-choice
- Subject: Azure AI

Microsoft is expanding Microsoft Sovereign Cloud with new controls for organizations that need to keep sensitive systems under their own oversight, including a Sovereign Control Panel entering public preview at Microsoft Ignite. The panel brings sovereignty signals into a unified Azure portal experience, helping customers understand their posture, apply and manage controls, and identify gaps and risks. Microsoft says the approach starts with the workload, letting organizations apply different levels of control across Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Private Cloud and a Sovereign Partner Ecosystem rather than forcing every application into one deployment model. For the EU and EFTA, Microsoft is rolling out Data Guardian, which adds European-resident oversight by a trusted EU partner for qualifying engineer remote access to in-scope production systems, alongside a Production Touch Ledger that creates tamper-evident records of that access. External key management with Azure Managed HSM is now generally available, letting customers keep the root encryption key in hardware they own and operate on-premises or through a trusted third party.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/20/advancing-digital-sovereignty-with-greater-control-and-choice/:

> External key management with Azure Managed HSM is now generally available, allowing customers to keep the root encryption key in hardware they own and operate on-premises or through a trusted third party.

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