In 2025, data sovereignty went from a European regulatory headache to a conversation that shows up in every enterprise deal I touch. The GSA CUI/CMMC divergence hitting MSPs in federal is just the tip of that iceberg. Every single one. Where does my data live? Who can access it? Which government has jurisdiction?
This isn’t GDPR round two. This is governments around the world deciding that data is a strategic asset and they’re not comfortable with it sitting in a hyperscaler’s Virginia data center. For channel partners, it means every cloud migration conversation now has a sovereignty component bolted onto it. If you can’t answer the residency question, someone else will, and they’ll take the deal with them. This is another reason your 2019 playbook is dead — the old “lift and shift to the cloud” pitch doesn’t survive a sovereignty audit.
The winners here will be partners who can build hybrid architectures. Cloud for scale, sovereign or on-prem for compliance. Mitel’s Edge platform is one answer to this problem in the UC space. It’s more complex to sell and more complex to manage. That’s exactly why it pays well. Partners who can navigate this complexity are the opposite of the death of the generalist VAR — they’re specialists with a moat.