IBM Sovereign Core and Duality Technologies combine customer-operated sovereign control with privacy-enhancing technologies to help organizations analyze and collaborate across sensitive, distributed data without exposing raw information.
IBM Sovereign Core and Duality Technologies combine a customer-operated sovereign software foundation with privacy-preserving data collaboration.
IBM Sovereign Core maintains platform identity, access, keys, logs and operational control within the sovereign boundary, while Duality enables approved analytics and AI workloads to use protected data across organizations and environments.
Why sovereign AI needs sovereign data collaboration
As organizations develop sovereign AI platforms, they face a new challenge: essential data is often distributed across governments, healthcare providers, financial institutions, research organizations and partners. Even within a single organization, departments may be unable to share sensitive information. Privacy, regulatory, operational and sovereignty requirements often prevent this data from being moved, centralized or exposed. Traditionally, organizations have addressed this challenge by moving data to AI systems.
As sovereignty requirements evolve, a new approach is emerging. The next generation of AI will not be built from a single data repository. Instead, success will depend on secure collaboration across distributed datasets owned by different organizations, each operating under distinct jurisdictions, policies, and trust boundaries. For example, healthcare providers must collaborate on research, and financial institutions require broader visibility into risk and fraud patterns.
Government agencies also need to exchange intelligence and operational information, but often the underlying data cannot leave its original environment. This presents a core challenge for sovereign AI: how can organizations generate insights from data they cannot share?
IBM Sovereign Core and Duality help answer that question by combining governed operations and continuous compliance evidence within the sovereign environment with privacy-enhancing technologies that support analytics and AI across protected, distributed data.
3 ways IBM Sovereign Core and Duality extend sovereign AI
1. Federated workloads across departments and sovereign clouds
Public-sector and defense missions often rely on data distributed across departments, government offices, agencies or sovereign cloud environments. Duality enables approved AI and analytics workloads to operate across these environments without pooling or exposing raw data. Each organization maintains custody and policy control over its information, while permitted results are securely combined and accessed within the IBM Sovereign Core environment.
This approach supports cross-agency analytics, multi-department workflows, federated AI and collaboration across sovereign cloud environments.
2. Protected use of public cloud capacity
Some AI and analytics workloads require additional computing capacity that may not always be available within the sovereign environment. By using Duality’s privacy-enhancing technologies with IBM Sovereign Core, organizations can extend approved workloads to scalable public cloud resources while maintaining appropriate security, privacy and execution controls.
This enables organizations to access additional computing capacity as needed, without creating unnecessary central copies of sensitive information or relinquishing governance over workloads and outputs.
3. Confidential use of external data sources
Government and defense analysts often require information from outside the sovereign environment, such as commercial data, open-source intelligence, partner-held data and other external sources.
Duality enables sensitive queries or selection criteria to remain protected when interacting with external data providers. Only authorized data or approved results are returned to the sovereign environment.
The external provider does not need to learn the analyst’s target, query or intent, and the sovereign organization does not need to acquire or replicate the provider’s entire dataset.
Make protected collaboration part of the sovereign operating model
The next phase of sovereign AI will not depend on bringing all data together. It will depend on enabling trusted collaboration across data that cannot be moved or exposed.
As sovereign AI initiatives mature, organizations require more than infrastructure sovereignty. They need sovereignty over collaboration: the ability to securely generate intelligence across distributed data while maintaining ownership, compliance and trust.
IBM Sovereign Core delivers a customer-operated control plane, in-boundary identity, access and key management, and continuous compliance evidence for the sovereign environment. Duality extends protected collaboration across the sensitive data participating in those workflows.
“Digital sovereignty isn’t a constraint; it expands what organizations can do with their most sensitive data,” said Alon Kaufman, Co-founder & CEO, Duality Technologies. “That shift is reshaping how regulated industries think about AI, and it’s becoming a deciding factor in adopting and applying it. Duality’s platform combines multiple privacy-enhancing technologies to enable secure AI and analytics across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries, giving organizations new freedom with data that was previously off-limits. Working with IBM Sovereign Core brings together complementary capabilities and a shared vision for the next era of enterprise AI—one where organizations that can securely collaborate across sensitive, distributed data will define the competitive landscape for years to come.”
“Sovereign AI is about enabling organizations to innovate with AI while maintaining control over their data, workloads, and regulatory obligations,” said Will Streit, Vice President, IBM Software. “Together, IBM Sovereign Core and Duality’s privacy-enhancing technologies can help organizations securely collaborate across sensitive and distributed data while preserving governance, security and trust.”
What this means for clients
Together, IBM Sovereign Core and Duality give organizations a governed way to use protected data across distributed environments while maintaining control over sensitive information, workloads and permitted outputs.
- Run approved workloads across departments, agencies and sovereign clouds.
- Collaborate without exposing sensitive source data between participating organizations.
- Access scalable public cloud resources while maintaining control over workloads and outputs.
- Use external data without disclosing sensitive investigations, targets or intent.
- Apply consistent policy enforcement and auditability across participating environments.
- Generate shared intelligence without building a new centralized data repository.
Advancing sovereign AI without centralizing sensitive data
Organizations that gain the greatest advantage from AI will be those that collaborate across data most effectively, not simply those with the most data.
By combining IBM Sovereign Core’s customer-operated control plane and governance foundation with Duality’s privacy-enhancing technologies, organizations can move beyond the traditional tradeoff between data protection and innovation. Together, IBM Sovereign Core and Duality are helping establish the foundation for a new generation of sovereign AI, one where insights can flow across healthcare systems, financial institutions, governments, research organizations and partner ecosystems without requiring sensitive data to leave the environments where it belongs.
Explore how IBM Sovereign Core and Duality Technologies can help organizations unlock the value of sensitive data while maintaining the sovereignty, governance and operational control required for the AI era.
Author: Sachin Prasad
Director, Product Management – IBM Sovereign Core, Cognos, SPSS & Optim
IBM
