Sovereignty: the first steps

The 1984 Apple commercial is legendary!

A young girl throws a hammer into a screen, breaking the control of corporate power. When I started writing this blog about sovereignty, that image popped into my head. Sovereignty, or digital sovereignty, is a term we hear a lot these days. What does it actually mean? And why is everyone talking about it?

At first, I thought it was just about making sure personal data doesn’t fall under the US Cloud Act, which allows the US government to access it. But that’s not what digital sovereignty is really about.

Revamping my blog in a changing world

The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. Not only technologically, but also geopolitically. As a kid, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s — a time when tensions between the West and the East were high, with both sides threatening to obliterate each other using nuclear missiles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, East and West found more common ground, and the fear of mutual destruction began to fade.

Sometimes you need to reboot...

Almost a year ago I created this blog… I mean not exactly this blog, but its predecessor “blog.somethingazure.com”. I thought that the name did match the content. Fast Forward a couple of months in time…. I learned that my job as Azure Coding Architect involved quite a few more technology areas than just Azure. Furthermore I was not happy with the look-and-feel of the blog; it was visually not attractive. Time for a major overhaul!

Introduction

You have found my personal blog. This blog will be focused around Microsoft Azure technologies, hence the name “something Azure”. Let me introduce myself, my name is Bas van de Sande and I work as an Azure Coding Architect at Xpirit in the Netherlands.

As part of my daily job, I offer technical guidance, advice and hands-on assistance for a large number of (global) companies in various industries.

I have been working with Microsoft technologies since 1995 in various technical roles, since that time I have seen a large number of technologies passing by (Visual Studio technologies, SQL Server, BizTalk, Microsoft.Net, SharePoint, Dynamics CE etc). In one of my former jobs I have been doing product development on the Dynamics CE platform annd back then I used to blog very actively on my journey into CRM. Over the years I came to realize, that the continuous story of my life is system integration.