In October 2025, widespread cloud outages caused government agencies and critical enterprises to lose primary communication channels. Emergency response teams could not coordinate, and essential services from healthcare to finance were disrupted.
Millions of outage reports flooded monitoring platforms as over 1,000 public-sector and enterprise systems went offline. In the UK alone, the outage exposed nearly £1.7 billion in dependent services.
The event demonstrated a critical lesson: uptime promises from third-party providers do not guarantee operational control. This outage was a systemic failure that highlighted the risks of depending on infrastructure beyond an organization's direct authority. It exposed the difference between resilience as a metric and sovereignty as an operational necessity.
The Limits of Redundancy in a Centralized World
The real test of resilience isn’t uptime; it’s preparedness. When centralized systems go offline, the ability to maintain mission continuity depends on having sovereign, independent alternatives. A single point of failure in a hyperscaler's infrastructure—whether affecting authentication, DNS, or core APIs—can create a cascading impact across thousands of dependent systems. Financial transactions halt, emergency alerts are delayed, and cross-agency coordination becomes impossible.
Many organizations equate redundancy with resilience, often by mirroring workloads across multiple cloud environments. However, this strategy is flawed when all paths share the same hidden dependencies. If authentication services or control planes are managed by a single external provider, your backups may fail simultaneously with your primary systems. This is not a failure of redundancy, but a failure of autonomy.
Organizations without a clear view of their dependency chains are at risk. Without this insight, resilience is just an illusion. If a provider's systems fail, your operations depend on their priorities, not yours. True reliability requires autonomy.
Sovereignty: The Foundation of Operational Control
Sovereign communications are defined by jurisdictional authority, accountability, and national control — not by availability metrics. A sovereign system ensures that no foreign jurisdiction, commercial provider, or external actor can dictate access or functionality. Several high-profile incidents highlight the sovereign communications imperative: Chinese state-sponsored Volt Typhoon APT has compromised US critical infrastructure communications, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack took down critical US pipeline operations and recent Russian GPS and GNSS jamming has repeatedly disrupted aircraft navigation.
A truly sovereign architecture is built to resist both disruption and external control. It keeps encryption keys, metadata, and operational oversight within your nation's legal and practical boundaries. This is the distinction between renting infrastructure and owning your security posture.
A solution can only be considered sovereign if it meets specific criteria:
- Operates within your jurisdiction: All data, infrastructure, and encryption keys remain under your organization's direct control.
- Functions independently: Core services like authentication and routing continue to operate even if external providers fail.
- Is fully auditable: Every layer of the system can be independently verified for data flow, access controls, and compliance.
- Ensures mission continuity: The system is designed to persist through major disruptions, including geopolitical events.
Systems built on public cloud infrastructure or subject to foreign jurisdictional oversight cannot deliver this level of assurance. Sovereignty is an operating principle, not an add-on feature.
BlackBerry Secure Communications: The Path to Sovereign Resilience
BlackBerry® Secure Communications provides the foundation for genuine resilience. It enables governments and critical enterprises to achieve full ownership of their data, encryption keys, and communication channels for true operational oversight.
Unlike commercial cloud tools where encryption keys or metadata may be stored or managed externally, BlackBerry enables complete key custody, verifiable data handling, and end-to-end cryptographic assurance, all within the customer’s designated jurisdiction. This approach delivers mission reliability engineered for the zero-tolerance standards of government and critical infrastructure.
BlackBerry Secure Communications provides:
- Jurisdictional Authority: Control remains within national borders and subject to your national laws.
- Auditability and Accountability: Transparent and verifiable system components give you confidence in your security posture.
- Operational Continuity: Communications persist through outages or attacks, ensuring leaders can coordinate and respond.
Trust Validated by Government-Grade Certifications
BlackBerry Secure Communications is backed by independent, government-grade certifications. These validations are essential for establishing trust and assuring mission success in high-stakes environments.
