Microsoft has unveiled Cloud for Sovereignty, a new offering designed to help the public sector comply with regulators' increasingly strict requirements to keep data within a certain geographical area.
The move comes as many of the big cloud hosting providers are rolling out similar services to help firms support digital sovereignty; Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has addressed some of the same issues with the launch of a new sovereign cloud regions for its customers in the EU.
Digital sovereignty refers to the idea that data is subject to the laws and governance of the nation it is collected in.
What do users get?
Users will be able to run their Azure workloads, as well as other core Micorosft services such as Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, in more than 60 data centre regions.
Users will also get access to a “Sovereign Landing Zone”, a portal used to manage compliance and provide recommendations about changes that are needed.
“Customers can specify the country or region for most service deployments with the ability to satisfy industry, national, or global security, privacy, and compliance requirements,” Microsoft noted in a blog post (opens in new tab) announcing the news.
A date for general availability has yet to be announced, and service is set for private preview in a select number of regions.
There is definitely a demand for these sovereignty-focused offerings among users if research from Capgemini is to be believed.
It found over two-thirds (69%) of businesses said potential exposure to extra-territorial laws in a cloud environment could be a potential issue.
Google is piling in as well, offering new digital sovereignty features in a new batch of tools for Google Workspace.
- Not completely sold on Azure? Checkout our guide to the best alternative cloud hosting
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