Geopolitics isn’t background noise anymore. For CIOs, it’s become a design parameter they can’t ignore.
Recent Gartner research shows that 61% of CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe expect geopolitical factors to increase their reliance on local or regional cloud providers. More than half (53%) think these same pressures will limit how much they rely on global hyperscalers.
By 2030, Gartner predicts over 75% of enterprises outside the US will have some form of digital sovereignty strategy in place, usually built around sovereign or regional cloud choices. Add regulations like NIS2 and DORA, and you can see how this will impact critical communications and collaboration strategies in most organisations.
Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2026 names geopatriation as a key trend. The term geopatriation was first coined by Gartner in their 2025 How to Protect Geopolitically Risky Cloud Workloads research in which they describe geopatriation the following: moving company data and applications out of global public clouds and into local options such as sovereign clouds, regional cloud providers, or an organisation’s own data centres due to perceived geopolitical risk.
What stands out is how AI threads through everything now. Every strategic technology trend for 2026 connects back to AI somehow.
Put simply: 2026 is the year when “where your workloads live” becomes as important as “what your workloads do.”
Why Cloud-First Strategies Are Changing
Many organisations in Western Europe have accepted they can’t run everything in non-European cloud environments anymore. There are regulatory requirements to meet. Customer expectations to consider. And if you’re critical infrastructure, you don’t really have a choice.
Single vendor dependency has gone from theoretical risk to real concern. At the same time, Gartner forecasts IT spending in Europe will grow 11% in 2026, with cloud investments becoming more unpredictable as CIOs move services closer to home to strengthen digital sovereignty.
This shift – geopatriation – is not a simple “cloud exit”. It’s about rebalancing.
- Moving towards local, sovereign, or regional cloud and application providers.
- Reducing dependence on single global vendors.
- Taking back control over data, routing, and critical services.
Voice, contact centres, and collaboration tools feel this pressure most. They’re the nervous system of any organisation. When they go down, everything stops.
Three Pressures on Critical Communications & Collaboration
We work with customers as they figure out their critical communications and collaboration strategies. They’re dealing with three competing demands, and it’s not always easy to balance them:
- Sovereignty comes first for many. Data residency requirements, lawful intercept obligations, emergency calling standards, regulatory compliance. These aren’t optional. You either meet them, or you face consequences.
- Resilience matters just as much, perhaps more in some cases. Organisations need to keep services running when geopolitical events happen, when regulations change overnight, or when connectivity problems strike. Downtime isn’t just inconvenient anymore. For some organisations, it’s existential.
- Innovation is the third pressure, and it’s the one that stops organisations from just moving everything back on-premises. They still need the agility, AI capabilities, and user experience that cloud platforms deliver. Users expect it. And competitors are using it. Standing still isn’t really an option.
The good news? You don’t have to choose one at the expense of the others. Our customers are moving past the “all cloud” versus “all on-premises” debate. They’re building integrated or hybrid architectures that combine private, regional, and global capabilities.
What follows are some practical architectural strategies we’re implementing with customers to support them in their geopatriation journey. In our experience the architecture depends on the current state, business requirements and future state. We prefer continuous improvement over disruption. Rip-and-replace projects rarely end well.
Use Case #1: Hybrid Sovereign Core
Private Call Manager with Cloud Contact Centre
Scenario
Your organisation moved their entire voice and collaboration stack to the cloud a few years ago. But now you want more control over critical calling without giving up cloud simplicity and innovation.
Approach
You can deploy a private or sovereign call manager in your local data centre, a private data centre, or a sovereign cloud. This handles:
- Call routing
- Call forwarding
- Hunt groups
- Numbering plans
- Emergency routing
That are the core features that needs to work no matter what.
Then you integrate this with a cloud contact centre and collaboration suite that provides
- Omnichannel customer interactions across voice, chat, email, and social
- AI-based routing, analytics, and reporting
- Flexible, remote-first agent experiences
Benefits
Availability & resilience
Core telephony sits under your direct control, close to your users and your regulators. If a global cloud service has an outage or hits cross-border issues, basic calling still works. You’ve got availability where it counts.
Sovereignty by design
Sensitive signalling and call data stay within your geography whilst you still use global cloud capabilities where it makes sense.
Innovation without lock-in
You keep cloud AI benefits in your contact centre and collaboration tools, but numbering, routing, and emergency logic stay “home”.
Best suited for
This pattern works well for public sector organisations, utilities, healthcare, and financial services, anywhere voice is safety- or mission-critical and you can’t afford to lose it.
Use Case #2: Cloud Resilience
Zoom Phone integrated with Microsoft Teams
Scenario
Your organisation wants to stay fully cloud-based because you like the operational simplicity. But you want to avoid single-vendor dependency and improve resilience.
Approach
You can use Microsoft Teams as your collaboration and user interface layer – chat, meetings, channels. Then use Zoom Phone (or another specialist cloud telephony platform) as the underlying voice service. Integrate the two so that:
- Users can call directly from Teams while Zoom Phone provides the PSTN connectivity, numbering, and routing.
- Governance and routing policies are split across platforms to avoid single points of failure.
Benefits
Less vendor lock-in
Your collaboration stack and your voice stack are separate. If strategy changes, you’re not forced into a “big bang” migration.
Higher availability
A major outage in one cloud doesn’t necessarily take down your entire communication system.
Regional flexibility
You can choose voice platforms and data centres that align better with local regulations and sovereignty requirements, even if your collaboration platform stays global.
Best suited for
This approach suits organisations that have invested heavily in a global collaboration suite but want more flexibility in how and where voice gets delivered.
Use Case #3: Cohort-Based communication strategy
Frontline ≠ Back Office
Scenario
Your organisation has something noticed: “one size fits all” collaboration wastes money and underserves critical user groups. Not everyone needs the same tools.
Think about your frontline workers in logistics, field service, retail, or manufacturing. Compare them to your administrative staff. Then your knowledge workers and executives. Your contact centre agents. External partners and contractors. They all work differently. They use different devices. They have different security needs.
Instead of designing for an average user, we design for cohorts.
Approach
You can define user cohorts based on
- Mobility needs
- Device types (rugged devices, DECT, smartphones, softphones)
- Security requirements
- Application dependencies
Then choose purpose-built solutions for each group. Frontline workers might need secure voice, push-to-talk, non-IP or DECT in certain zones, and simplified features. Office staff get the full collaboration client with meetings, chat, and softphone. Agents need advanced contact centre tools, analytics, and quality monitoring.
You host each cohort’s services on the most appropriate platform.
- Sovereign or on-premises for highly regulated or critical roles.
- Regional or global cloud for less sensitive, highly collaborative roles.
Benefits
Cost savings
The cost savings can be significant. You stop paying for full UC licences for users who primarily need robust voice or push-to-talk.
Better fit to real work
Frontline users get tools designed for tough environments. Knowledge workers get rich collaboration features. Agents get optimised customer-interaction tools.
Granular sovereignty
You can geopatriate only the cohorts that actually need it (e.g. critical field service teams) instead of forcing your entire workforce into the same model.
This cohort approach is probably the most practical way to phase geopatriation without big-bang disruption. You can start with one group, see how it goes, then expand.
Use Case #4: Architectures for critical environments
Network separation and Non-IP Solutions
Scenario
Some customers operate in highly critical or high-risk environments, such as:
- Industrial plants and OT environments
- Defence, emergency services, and critical national infrastructure
- High-security government sites
For them, the question isn’t just “Which cloud?” It’s “Should this even be IP-based at all?”
Approach
You need physically and logically separated networks for business IT traffic versus OT and critical communications.
In some cases, you use non-IP or isolated IP solutions where service continuity must be guaranteed even if corporate IT or internet access is disrupted. Attack surfaces must be minimised.
You layer gateway functions at controlled boundaries, allowing carefully governed interaction between critical networks and cloud services for monitoring, reporting, or limited collaboration. Ensure failsafe behaviour if connections are lost.
Benefits
Maximum resilience
Critical communications stay insulated from broader IT or internet incidents.
Regulatory and security compliance
It’s easier to demonstrate strong segmentation and least-privilege access for regulatory and security compliance.
Controlled cloud usage
You can still use cloud analytics or AI at the edge of the critical environment without exposing core systems.
Best suited for
This pattern fits organisations where service continuity and safety override all other priorities. Where geopatriation means “keeping certain workloads entirely under your control”, no exceptions.
How Damovo helps turn Geopatriation into advantage
Our role as a critical communications and collaboration partner is to help you tackle these challenges based on your business strategy. We map your risk and sovereignty posture for voice, contact centre, and collaboration. We design hybrid and multi-cloud architectures that align with your regulatory and geopolitical reality. We implement cohort-based licensing and design, so you only pay for what each group actually needs. We engineer resilience, from non-IP fallbacks to multi-cloud routing and sovereign hosting.
Geopatriation isn’t about going backwards. It’s not a retreat. Done properly, it increases availability and reliability whilst preserving mobility and accelerating innovation in your collaboration environment. But it requires thought. It requires planning.
Let’s talk and see how we can turn your challenges into opportunities.