Data Expo 2026: a packed room and a clear message on digital autonomy

A full room for “Digital autonomy for the public sector: not a big bang, but a realistic path”

The talk, which we gave together with our GovTech partner xxllnc, set the tone for the rest of the show. The argument was simple: moving towards digital sovereignty does not mean tearing everything down and starting again overnight. It is a sequence of realistic steps, where the choices you make now shape how much room you have to manoeuvre later. Judging by the turnout on a strike day, that framing landed.

Five questions, one honest answer

Most lock-in never announces itself. It builds up quietly, through small and perfectly sensible decisions taken over years, until one day moving a workload somewhere else turns out to be far harder than anyone expected. Before you can plan a route out, it helps to know how tied in you already are. Run through these five questions and tick the ones that apply to your organisation:

1. Did you start with free credits or a trial account at a single cloud provider?

2. Do you use platform-specific services (e.g. Lambda, Cosmos DB, BigQuery ML)?

3. Is your identity management tied to a single ecosystem (e.g. Microsoft 365 / Entra ID)?

4. Do you have a multi-year discount contract in place (e.g. AWS EDP or a Microsoft EA)?

5. Do you know what it would cost to export all your data to another provider?

Now count. For the first four questions, every ticked box is a thread tying you to one provider; the more you ticked, the less room you have to move. The last question works the other way round: a blank box is the honest answer, because not knowing the exit cost is exactly how organisations discover it too late. None of this is a reason to panic. It is a starting point for deciding which step to take first.

Curious what your answers mean in practice? Book a discovery call and we'll map your five answers to the steps that make sense for you.

Two busy days at the Cyso booth

Our own stand saw a steady stream of visitors across both days. Most wanted to know more about our Managed Services, so Managed Operations, Migration & Deployment and Cybersecurity Solutions, and about our European Cloud Platform. Our nerve spiral game turned out to be a good conversation starter for the wider theme of our presence this year, the road to digital autonomy. Getting through it from start to finish without a single buzz proved trickier than most people expected, which kept the talking going.

Bringing existing customers along: compliance, security and patch management

For our existing customers we put together a dedicated programme. Together with their account manager they joined the talk, walked the exhibition floor, and afterwards sat down for a round-table on compliance, security and patch management. Those are the questions our customers are wrestling with right now, and hearing how peers from other sectors handle the same problems tends to be worth more than any brochure.

What we took home from Data Expo 2026

Two days of conversations left us with a clear picture. Digital autonomy is no longer treated as a political slogan; people are asking practical questions about where their data sits, who can access it, and how to move without breaking what already works. Compliance, security and patch management came up again and again, usually together. And the interest in a European cloud platform is not driven by sentiment alone but by a wish to know exactly which rules apply to their data. That is precisely the conversation we want to be part of.

Missed us? Let's talk digital autonomy

Weren't able to join us but still want the information digitally? Or would you rather just talk through how your organisation can take its next step towards digital autonomy? Schedule your discovery call with one of our business developers.