FEATURE
According to Improta, its verification procedures have expanded dramatically, from approximately 70 tests to around 500. Practical assessments had uncovered situations where requirements appeared to have been satisfied on paper but failed to hold up during testing.
One of the most revealing techniques is brutally simple. Disconnect it. after the relationship with a private technology partner ends.
That tackles another form of dependence that can be harder to see than foreign hardware: contractual lock-in.
The Disconnection Test, described during a public hearing on the Brazilian Cloud by Gildomiro Bairros, engineering manager of platforms and Cloud solutions at Serpro, puts a solution into a laboratory environment and cuts its external connection. Engineers then see what survives.
Can essential services continue operating? Can administrators still control the environment? Does some apparently local component suddenly stop working because it needs to communicate with a remote platform?
“ A solution that relies, for example, on a console located outside the national data center or on a permanent external connection for its administration presents a dependency that needs to be considered in the sovereignty assessment,” said Bairros.
It is effectively a technological stress test for sovereignty. The same principle becomes even more complicated when AI enters the equation.
Governments racing to build sovereign AI capacity frequently focus on compute: how many GPUs they possess, where the hardware is installed and who operates the data centre.
Brazil’ s approach suggests that is only part of the equation. A GPU sitting on national territory is still embedded in a wider technology stack encompassing software, libraries, management platforms and other components required to turn silicon into usable AI infrastructure. Sovereignty therefore depends on understanding the entire stack and determining which components could be replaced without bringing the system down.
The proposed Brazilian Cloud would use public infrastructure located in Brazil and be operated by a public company. Licensing conditions are also expected to allow the platform to continue operating, being maintained and evolving even
If pulling one external connection brings everything to a halt, the servers may be in Brazil. The sovereignty is somewhere else.
Owning infrastructure means relatively little if the software required to operate it becomes inaccessible when a commercial relationship terminates.
There are limits to Brazil’ s ambitions. Hardware is not currently the central target. The initiative excludes, at this stage, purchasing ICT and networking infrastructure as well as contracting hosting, colocation or housing services. Its focus is the software platform and Brazil’ s ability to develop, maintain and evolve it. That may prove to be the most pragmatic part of the strategy.
No major economy can easily reproduce the global semiconductor and Cloud supply chains that underpin modern computing. Attempting complete technological autarky would be enormously expensive and potentially counterproductive. But governments can decide where dependence becomes unacceptable.
That is the bigger experiment taking place inside the Brazilian Cloud. Instead of treating sovereignty as a label that can be attached to infrastructure because the servers happen to sit inside national borders, Brazil is trying to treat it as an engineering property – something that can be tested, scored and potentially broken.
The question is no longer whether foreign technology exists inside the stack. It almost certainly will. The question is what happens when that technology is no longer available.
If Brazil can still operate the platform, move workloads, administer critical systems and keep public services running, dependence remains manageable. If pulling one external connection brings everything to a halt, the servers may be in Brazil.
The sovereignty is somewhere else. •
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INTELLIGENT CIO LATAM
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