Microsoft announce comprehensive sovereign solutions empowering European organisations

Microsoft has just unveiled its Comprehensive Sovereign Solutions, a new suite of capabilities designed to help European public and private sector organisations meet evolving data residency, governance, and compliance needs. Their latest blog post which you can read below details what their Comprehensive Sovereign Solutions does.

This week we are taking the next step in strengthening our European Digital Commitments to empower our customers with greater choice, more control over their data privacy and the most robust digital resilience we have ever offered. Building on our 42-year history as a company in Europe, we are expanding our efforts with Microsoft Sovereign Cloud. This offer spans both public cloud and private digital infrastructure, ensuring our customers can choose the right balance of control, compliance and capability for their needs.

With this expanded offering we are announcing Data Guardian for European operations, External Key Management for customer-controlled encryption, Regulated Environment Management for simplified configuration and Microsoft 365 Local for critical productivity services in private cloud environments.

This brings together comprehensive productivity, security and cloud solutions designed to enable European organisations to grow, compete and lead on their own terms and with more control than ever before across Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Private Cloud and National Partner Clouds.

Building on our experience delivering sovereignty solutions that meet the needs of highly regulated customers and government agencies, our Sovereign Public Cloud is an evolution and expansion of the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and will be offered across all existing European datacenter regions, for all European customers, across enterprise services such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Security and Power Platform.

Sovereign Public Cloud ensures customer data stays in Europe, under European Law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel, and encryption is under full control of customers. This is enabled for all customer workloads running in our European datacenter regions requiring no migration.

Microsoft’s new Sovereign Private Cloud will support critical collaboration, communication and virtualisation services workloads on Azure Local. This solution now integrates Microsoft 365 Local and our security platform with Azure Local, providing consistent capabilities for hybrid or air-gapped environments to meet resiliency and business continuity requirements.

In France and Germany, our National Partner Clouds offer comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure in an independently owned and operated environment. In France, we have an agreement with Bleu, a joint venture between Orange and Capgemini, for Bleu to operate a “cloud de confiance” for the French public sector, critical infrastructure providers and essential services providers that is designed to meet SecNumCloud requirements. In Germany, we have an agreement with Delos Cloud, an SAP subsidiary, for Delos Cloud to operate a sovereign cloud for the German public sector that is designed to meet the German government’s Cloud Platform Requirements.

Across our Sovereign Public Cloud, Sovereign Private Cloud and support for National Partner Clouds, Microsoft Sovereign Cloud offers the most comprehensive set of sovereignty solutions in the industry for integrated productivity, security and cloud.

Many technology providers have approached sovereignty as niche requirements for a unique set of customers that require a specific deployment approach that at times is at odds with the economics and innovation of public cloud systems. This often requires running duplicate systems and teams, migrating to separate environments and limiting access to cutting-edge technologies like AI.

However, Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud builds an evolving set of sovereign capabilities that can be configured to meet specific needs without sacrificing functionality or requiring migration to specialised data centres. With Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud currently in preview and set to be generally available in all European cloud regions later this year, we will introduce new features and solutions that reinforce this vision.

Our EU Data Boundary already provides an industry-leading commitment to store and process your data on infrastructure located in Europe. Data Guardian will add an additional level of assurance by ensuring that only Microsoft personnel residing in Europe control remote access to these systems. Data Guardian adds additional human and technical oversight whenever engineers outside of Europe need access. All remote access by Microsoft engineers to the systems that store and process your data in Europe is approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real time and will be logged in a tamper-evident ledger.

Encryption under the full control of customers provides an additional guarantee of data protection. With external key management, customers can connect Azure to keys stored on their own Hardware Security Module (HSM) on-premises or hosted by a trusted third party. We’re working with major HSM manufacturers such as Futurex, Thales and Utimaco to ensure their support.

The Regulated Environment Management service will allow customers to easily manage all these features in one place (for instance, configuring Data Guardian policies or reviewing access log entries). Regulated Environment Management will be at the centre of the customer experience for configuring, deploying and monitoring workloads in support of sovereign operations. Together, these tools will be at the centre of the customer experience for configuring, deploying and monitoring workloads in the Sovereign Public Cloud.

While strengthening sovereign controls in public cloud environments is critical, we also understand that some scenarios require certain workloads be run in a physical environment under full customer control to support business continuity risk mitigation. Azure Local delivers Microsoft cloud services in customer locations, enabling organisations to meet specific data residency and sovereignty requirements.

It includes core Azure capabilities — such as compute, storage, networking and virtualisation services — while providing a consistent management and developer experience. Azure Local is ideal for delivering services closer to where data is generated or regulated, whether in-country, on-premises or in partner-operated data centres. Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud solution is in preview today and will be generally available later this year.

Microsoft 365 Local provides customers with additional choice by bringing together Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment that can run entirely in a customer’s own datacenter.

This provides a simplified deployment and management framework for organisations to run Microsoft’s trusted productivity servers in environments they fully control. Built on our validated reference architecture and powered by Azure Local, Microsoft 365 Local enables customers to deploy Microsoft productivity workloads like Exchange Server and SharePoint Server in their own data centres or sovereign cloud environments — with full control on security, compliance and governance.

Private Sovereign Cloud is designed for governments, critical industries and regulated sectors that need to meet the highest standards of data residency, operational autonomy and disconnected access.

To support European customers in implementing and operating sovereign solutions, we are also excited to preview a new Microsoft Sovereign Cloud specialisation in the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. This specialisation will provide our European customers the ability to identify Partners who have differentiated themselves based on their demonstrated capabilities in supporting their Sovereign Cloud ambitions on Microsoft technology. Our preview partners include Accenture, Arvato Systems, Atea, Atos, Crayon, Capgemini, Dell Technologies, IBM, Inspark, Infosys, Lenovo, Leonardo, NTT Data, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone.

“The launch of Microsoft Sovereign Cloud marks a pivotal moment in empowering European institutions and industries with the control, compliance and innovation they need to thrive in today’s digital economy,” said Aiman Ezzat, CEO of Capgemini Group.

“As a shareholder of Bleu, we have already set up a National Partner Cloud in France in order to deliver Microsoft technologies in a sovereign environment that respects the French State requirements. With decades of experience in Microsoft technologies and deep expertise in regulated sectors, we are uniquely positioned to help our clients harness the full power of Microsoft’s sovereign public and private cloud solutions. Together, we are enabling a trusted digital future for Europe.”

Together, Microsoft Sovereign Cloud is grounded in our European Digital Commitments and offers the best mix of choice, control and resilience for European customers. Microsoft is proud to offer the broadest set of sovereignty solutions available on the market today and we will constantly look for new ways to ensure our European customers have the options and assurances they need to operate with confidence.

In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. With each step we take in this journey, we invite open dialogues with our customers, policymakers and regulators as we continue to innovate.