Over the last few years, as public cloud has become a critical utility, nations have placed an increased importance on the sovereignty of this essential capability.  Recent geo-political tension is accelerating the trend for governments and regulated industries to look for cloud strategies that meet their sovereign requirements.  According to the United Nations 80% of countries have enacted or drafted data privacy legislation, and analyst firm IDC projects that half of all European organizations will spend 10% of their IT budgets to comply with sovereignty rules adopted in the EU.

Sources:  

1 https://unctad.org/page/data-protection-and-privacy-legislation-worldwide 

2 IDC, From Virtualization to Sovereign Cloud: VMware Assures its Place in Europe’s Digital Future, Doc # EUR148880422, February 2022 

VMware’s Sovereign Cloud Initiative Momentum Continues 

Businesses in regulated industries such as the banking and financial sector, healthcare, local retail and ecommerce, energy, government services, defense, intelligence, regional telecom, and public sectors are all looking for solutions.  To respond to these market needs, we announced the VMware Sovereign Cloud initiative at VMworld 2021.  Since that time, we have expanded the initiative to 14 cloud providers that provide solutions in distinct sovereign regions covering Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, UAE, UK, and the United States.  Each of these cloud providers build their sovereign cloud offerings on the most trusted software-defined infrastructure stack built on VMware vSphere, which has proven itself with over 300,000 customers worldwide.  

And customers are taking note.  For example, Hummingbird, an Australian IT services company providing a range of business enhancing services across government and the private sector, partnered with AUCloud as a sovereign cloud provider.  As solutions architect Andrew Thomlinson-Munn said:  

“Hummingbird Solutions choose to work with AUCloud as an IaaS provider for their strength in delivering hosting solutions on a proven platform with VMware and their ability to provide a sovereign cloud solution to conform to our customer’s internal and regulatory compliance requirements. Working with AUCloud, which is part of the VMware Sovereign Cloud initiative, provides Hummingbird with the confidence that we are backed by a best-in-class infrastructure solution, with a partner that has the skills and expertise to complement our own.” 

Beyond Infrastructure to Developer and Data Services 

At VMware, we are committed to providing best-in-class sovereign cloud solutions with our partners, we know that a comprehensive solution requires more than infrastructure and platform delivered as a service.  That’s why we are now also offering VMware Tanzu Application Platform and VMware Tanzu Data Services portfolio for cloud provider partners to expand their sovereign cloud services. 
Tanzu Application Platform provides a rich set of developer tooling and fast and simple path to production for developers to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes clusters. Developers can start quickly with preconfigured templates, gain access to best-in-class tools in the application development pipeline, and create and maintain a secure, sustainable, and reusable pathway for modern applications throughout their lifecycle. Importantly, customers can establish a clear separation between Developers and Operations for seamless app handoffs from development to production. 

Tanzu Data Services is a portfolio of on-demand caching, messaging, and database software for development teams to use while building modern cloud-native applications. With Tanzu Data Services, which include Greenplum, SQL, Gemfire, and RabbitMQ, developers gain on-demand self-service access to these critical data services. Automated provisioning supports rapid development, testing, and continuous delivery practices for a consistent developer experience within Sovereign Clouds. Customers can bring legacy data into the cloud native model and more reliably run data services at web scale. 

Bringing Security and Object Storage Solutions from our Ecosystem Partners 

VMware’s large technology ecosystem ensures that our sovereign cloud providers have a wealth of solutions to augment their offerings.  Now, it gets even better – we have worked with our technology partners to provide new capabilities in the following areas: 

• Integrated Self-Service Sovereign Object Storage: Cloudian Object Storage for VMware Cloud Director is a storage platform that lets VMware Cloud providers and their tenant users deploy, manage and consume S3-compatible storage within their services environment to support the growing data volumes of national data and innovation in application development. 
• Integrated ransomware protection, backup and recovery: Veeam and Cloudian provide immutable storage and rapid recovery capabilities with Veeam backup and restore and instant VM recovery that help protect sovereign environments and critical sovereign data from ransomware attacks. 
• Integrated key management services and safeguarding data: Fortanix delivers an integrated data security platform which provides customers more control over highly sensitive workloads, and which solves privacy and compliance requirements within the VMware Sovereign cloud boundary.   VMWare partner key services may be provided within sovereign clouds for workload and data protection including encryption, tokenization, and secrets management. Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM) provides FIPS 140-2 Level 3-certified HSM and key management with regional isolation to comply with local data privacy requirements globally.   In particular, GDPR and technical measures specified by the European Data Protection Board including the impact of the Schrems II ruling on data transfers, are fully resolved with a combination of the VMware Sovereign cloud deployment architecture and Fortanix Data Security Manager. 

Through VMware Cloud Director, VMware Cloud providers can easily leverage ecosystem partners to deliver these integrated services, creating a robust platform to meet many Sovereign Cloud principles. 

Navigate Change with Confidence 

The cloud landscape is constantly evolving and keeping up with the latest in technologies and new regulations can seem daunting.  Together with our partners, we are committed to help you by working with our partners to deliver the best-in-class sovereign cloud offerings both now and in the future. 

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