Digital sovereignty on a tightrope: Xient at the 25th Bonn Dialogue on Cybersecurity

On Tuesday, October 6, 2026, we attended the 25th Bonn Dialogue on Cybersecurity at the University of Bonn's Poppelsdorf campus. The anniversary edition of the format, run by Fraunhofer FKIE and the University of Bonn together with the City of Bonn, the Bonn/Rhein-Sieg Chamber of Commerce, Deutsche Telekom and the Alliance for Cybersecurity, carried the title "Self-determined, secure, sovereign: Germany's digital tightrope walk".

Bonn's Lord Mayor Guido Déus opened the evening, Isabell Weiß gave the keynote, and experts from business, research, politics and public administration took the panel before the evening closed with networking. The guiding question was the one that has occupied us for months: how does a country stay capable of acting when its digital infrastructure, its data and increasingly its decisions depend on technologies it does not control?

The evening mattered to us for two reasons. First, digital sovereignty was not treated as a cloud question but as an interplay of research, application, administration and politics. That is exactly the line we took in our guest article for eGovernment: sovereignty is decided in the decision architecture, not only by where the servers stand. Second, FKIE has spent years researching the very questions behind Xient Resilience Intelligence, the fusion of heterogeneous data, the assessment of its reliability, and support for human decisions when it counts.

The conversations continue. Bonn is a short trip for a firm rooted in the Rhineland, and the Bonn Dialogue now has a fixed place in the Xient Radar.