Microsoft is taking significant steps to strengthen its European Digital Commitments by introducing Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, a comprehensive solution designed to empower European customers with greater choice, control over data privacy, and robust digital resilience for European customers. This initiative builds on Microsoft’s 42-year history in Europe and is part of its broader efforts to provide sovereignty solutions that meet the evolving needs of highly regulated customers and government agencies.
Microsoft Sovereign Cloud Overview
Microsoft Sovereign Cloud combines both public cloud and private digital infrastructure, allowing customers to choose the right balance of control, compliance, and capability for their specific needs. The offering includes several key components:
- Sovereign Public Cloud: An evolution of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, available across all European datacenter regions. It ensures customer data remains in Europe, under European law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel. Encryption is under the full control of customers.
- Sovereign Private Cloud: Supports critical collaboration, communication, and virtualization services on Azure Local. This solution integrates Microsoft 365 Local and security platforms with Azure Local, providing consistent capabilities for hybrid or air-gapped environments.
- National Partner Clouds: In France and Germany, Microsoft has partnered with local companies to offer comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Azure in independently owned and operated environments, meeting specific national requirements.
Key Features and Announcements
- Data Guardian: Adds an additional level of assurance by ensuring that only Microsoft personnel residing in Europe control remote access to customer systems. All remote access by Microsoft engineers is approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real-time and logged in a tamper-evident ledger.
- External Key Management: Allows customers to connect Azure to keys stored on their own Hardware Security Module (HSM) on-premises or hosted by a trusted third party, providing an additional guarantee of data protection.
- Regulated Environment Management: A service that allows customers to manage features like Data Guardian policies and review access log entries in one place, simplifying the configuration, deployment, and monitoring of workloads in support of sovereign operations.
- Microsoft 365 Local: Brings Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment, enabling customers to run Microsoft productivity workloads in their own datacenters or sovereign cloud environments with full control over security, compliance, and governance.
Partner Ecosystem
To support European customers, Microsoft is previewing a new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud specialization in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. This will help customers identify partners with demonstrated capabilities in supporting Sovereign Cloud ambitions on Microsoft technology. Preview partners include major industry players like Accenture, Capgemini, and Dell Technologies.
Conclusion
Microsoft Sovereign Cloud represents a significant step forward in Microsoft’s commitment to providing European customers with the control, compliance, and innovation needed to thrive in today’s digital economy. By offering a broad set of sovereignty solutions, Microsoft aims to provide digital stability in a time of geopolitical volatility, ensuring customers can operate with confidence.
