Mastering Digital Sovereignty: From the Network to the Data

Control, trust and resilience in an era of geopolitical and regulatory shifts

In an era of geopolitical and regulatory shifts, establishing digital sovereignty has become a critical component of enterprise strategy. This strategic dialogue focuses on the network's foundational role in achieving control, trust, and resilience. We will explore how a modern, resilient infrastructure enables the enforcement of data policies and ensures operational continuity.

This strategic dialogue in a select group of peers is designed for digital leaders to share insights on one of the most pressing challenges today. We will discuss the fabric of sovereign-ready networks and debate the rising concerns over data sovereignty that are driving stricter privacy and data protection policies worldwide ->

Enforcing Data Sovereignty and Trust: Protecting sensitive data with robust encryption during network transmission and applying residency rules to data in motion. We will also discuss the role of identity and access management (IAM) capabilities.

Achieving Operational Resilience and Control: Gaining comprehensive visibility and control through real-time network monitoring and auditing tools to verify data flows.

Designing the Sovereign-Ready Network: Building an agile and scalable network architecture to handle the complexity of sovereign flows. This includes the need for programmability so that business intent can be acted upon by the network , and segmentation based on geo or sector considerations.

Speakers and Panellists

Find out more about the speakers and our panellists

Colin Bannon

CTO

BT Business

Colin Bannon is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for BT Business based in the company’s head office in London, UK. He delivers BT’s product technology strategy and design, as well as customer solutions that support business outcomes across the unit’s entire UK and international customer base.

Colin leads a CTO team delivering for customers of all sizes from the largest multinational enterprises and governmental organisations to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

They support customers choosing from a core portfolio of over 200 communication services delivered across 180 countries in vertical sectors including government, defence and healthcare as well as banking & finance, retail, wholesale telecommunications, mining, logistics and manufacturing.

Colin is the architect of some of the largest customer network transformations in the world, including BT’s new global network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, Global Fabric. Global Fabric is a fully digitalised, automated, API-first platform that includes Internet, MPLS, Ethernet, Cloud interconnectivity, DC Interconnect, Mobile Interconnect, Data Sovereignty, DDos, and Edge Compute. It supports service insertion including SD-WAN and SASE, SSE, SIP, Load Balancing, and Firewalls. Following the announcement of Global Fabric, BT was recognised by Gartner as being the furthest on “Completeness of Vision” in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Global WAN Services.

One of Colin’s many responsibilities is to anticipate technology trends such as AI development and to ensure BT can support customers’ future roadmaps, keeping the company relevant in a fast-changing digital world. He acts as a trusted advisor for many customers’ chief information officers (CIOs) and facilitates BT’s global customer advisory board.

Colin is an award-winning and recognised industry expert in designing, deploying and running many of the world’s largest next generation networks. His holistic philosophy to network design, works back from business outcomes, user experience and applications dev strategy to inform intuitive network, architecture, systems and service-wrap design. He is a sought-after industry speaker and is active in several technology advisory/standards boards supporting the vendor ecosystem. He also lectures at Warwick University.

In addition to his 20 years at BT, including roles such as Chief Architect, Colin previously held engineering leadership and consulting engineer positions in IBM Global Services, Lucent INS and Unisys.

Program

Join this high-energy conversation and celebration of great digital leadership!