Sovereign Collaboration: Elect Enhanced Government Security

Governments and public services are facing increasingly sophisticated threats, from nation-state to insider activity.

Katie Burchell

• 26 November 2025
• 5min read

The Homeland Threat Assessment 2025 highlights this increased threat level, citing attacks like the state-sponsored Volt Typhoon campaign that breached multiple critical infrastructure organizations. Earlier this year, the UK’s Legal Aid Agency (LAA), part of the Ministry of Justice, was hit by an attack that compromised 2.1 million pieces of personal data.

Today’s threat landscape has brought the importance of secure, sovereign collaboration capabilities within public services into sharp focus. Compounding the risks, we also continue to see widespread reliance on foreign cloud providers – as of today, up to 80% of the UK cloud infrastructure market is dominated by foreign providers.

To protect civic data effectively, maintain trust, and ensure compliance, knowing why sovereign collaboration is crucial for governments is essential. Our experts have also detailed key use cases and how governments are responding.

What does sovereignty mean for governments?

Governments have to work with other states, organizations and private sector partners, but the sovereignty of critical data must be ensured.

Data residency refers to the requirement that data collected within a country’s borders be processed, managed, and stored within its jurisdiction. This is directly linked to compliance requirements like GDPR in Europe, which the EU’s Data Governance Act is tethered to, and national policies like HIPAA in the United States.

With critical infrastructure increasingly under attack, it is imperative that governments maintain resilient sovereign control of it. Selecting the right network, cloud, and computing resources is essential, as is enforcing security and operational policies.

The right sovereign collaboration platform equips government organizations with capabilities like local storage processing, as well as controlled cross-border sharing and auditability. In terms of compliance, an effective platform will help support policy enforcement, provide third-party assurance, and implement the secure governance organizations need.

It is vital to note that even the most technologically sophisticated cloud security systems used by governments can be undermined by legal and jurisdictional pressure points – summing up the sovereignty crisis governments have to navigate.

Real-world risks

We continue to see serious data leaks linked to local authorities and agencies.

Glasgow City Council was hit by a spear-phishing attack in recent months, delivered via a suspicious meeting invitation. Although the extent of the breach is unknown, it is feared that personal data was exfiltrated, triggering a joint investigation by Police Scotland, the Scottish Cyber Co-ordination Centre (SC3) and the NCSC.

In another instance from earlier this year, U.S. Federal and State agencies were impacted by a zero-day attack targeting users of Microsoft SharePoint – including the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Eight servers across the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were taken offline by the attack, and SharePoint was unavailable to users at the Defense Intelligence Agency for several hours.

In May 2025, the UK’s Legal Aid Agency, part of the Ministry of Justice, also disclosed a significant cyber incident that forced its online collaboration and case-management services offline while investigators worked to contain the breach.

Attackers accessed and exfiltrated a large volume of sensitive personal data dating back to 2010, including contact details, financial information and some criminal history records. The National Crime Agency and NCSC were engaged, and the MoJ confirmed that a “significant amount” of data had been downloaded – underlining how dependencies on non-sovereign, cloud-based systems and legacy platforms can amplify exposure across critical public services.

Sovereign collaboration in action

There are many ways in which sophisticated sovereign collaboration capabilities can be used to secure the critical work of governments, with prime examples including:

• Cabinet and ministerial meetings – enabling key officials to meet via a private, end-to-end encrypted video platform. This means authenticated entry, strict access control, and no external data routing.
• Inter-agency collaboration – virtual workspaces for multidepartment groups to collaborate securely, including federated identity and cross-domain access controls. Joint task force operations and intergovernmental co-ordination are prime examples.
• Secure communication with citizens and partners – from secure video hearings for legal aid or social services, to remote engagement between healthcare providers and patients, sovereign collaboration capabilities close many security gaps.

In a podcast on delivering solutions for Federal and Department of Defense customers, Giles Adams, CEO at VQ, describes an anonymous customer that “has a global deployment with various levels of network security, requiring multiple instances of VQ and a lot of open dialogue with our engineering teams.”Here Giles provides an example of the highly tailored support we provide for government organizations worldwide.

Secure conferencing – an act of national importance

The rate of sovereign cloud and hybrid solution adoption is accelerating rapidly among government organizations. In a new announcement, the European Commission has moved forward on cloud sovereignty with a EUR 180 million tender –enabling EU institutions, bodies, offices, and agencies to procure sovereign services over six years.

We are also seeing a clear uptick in regulation-driven procurement, with sovereign collaboration capabilities at the heart of this alignment effort. Governments are updating their procurement rules in a bid to guarantee that any cloud or data service they buy is compliant with national sovereignty standards.

At VQ, we are actively enabling government organizations to achieve the most resilient, innovative sovereign collaboration via our solutions. Working with global partners like Cisco helps us to do this, combining leading infrastructure like the Cisco Meeting Server with our powerful software. Our video conferencing solution is

To find out more about building your own sovereign collaboration services with our support, get in touch with our experts!