Sovereign clouds can provide services to customers without creating vendor dependencies. Popular in continental Europe, they can also be effective in the UK, and partners have a key role to play, says Penny Philpot, vice president ecosystems EMEA, Red Hat.
European companies acknowledge cloud is a game-changer and many have it at the forefront of their strategies. The benefit is the increased flexibility and responsiveness it offers in today’s fast-paced business world. However, regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and the public sector must also navigate complex policy requirements around data control and jurisdiction.
EU regulators recognise this digital dilemma. Initiatives like DORA, NIS2 and IEA help organisations gain resilient, interoperable and customisable cloud infrastructure. The message is clear: embrace the cloud confidently without ceding control.
Sovereign clouds
This is where sovereign clouds come into play. A sovereign cloud refers to an environment designed to provide services without creating vendor dependencies. Services are typically either open source or have equivalent vendor-independent alternatives (via open standards), allowing users more flexibility to exchange cloud service provider or vendor. Notably, a sovereign cloud emphasises user control, maintaining data ownership and usability within the user’s domain.
Collaborations between local and global cloud providers are vital to enable success, meaning partners that sit at these cross-roads have a huge advantage.
Kickstarting cloud sovereignty
Organisations searching for sovereign cloud solutions need partners for long-term collaboration. Implementing sovereignty principles is a long-term process that involves adapting to new IT requirements in terms of infrastructure, security and governance frameworks. These factors emerge as pivotal criteria for evaluating solutions and must be a shared responsibility across all partners, so a close working relationship between provider and customer is crucial.
Customers that are earlier in their cloud modernisation journey and approach to
digital transformation will rely heavily on partners for expertise in cloud sovereignty, including guidance on data and workload classification. This hands-on guidance unlocks doors for partners with hybrid and multi-cloud expertise and fuels customer progress towards sovereignty.
True sovereignty lies not in specific vendors, but open participation on the basis of open standards and open source licensing and culture. Regulations alone cannot safeguard empowerment – it springs from technology accessibility. Partners who embrace open source for cloud self-reliance take the first step; those who champion open collaboration take the next.
Regulatory conversations around cloud sovereignty can be hard to have, because the term means different things to different parties. Rather than getting bogged down in semantics, it might be better to study tangible examples that are anticipating where policy trajectory could land. Hosted in Germany IONOS is dedicated to establishing a trusted and digitally sovereign cloud for communication and collaboration based on open source technology.
Another recent example is Cloud Temple, a provider of cloud infrastructure to the French public sector. Cloud Temple recently committed to open source as the means to offer a sufficiently broad and competitive ecosystem of services to its customers. This is the clarion call for partners – lead customers from cloud curiosity to capability. Guide migration and workloads while showcasing regional implementations that anticipate policy.
Most importantly, advocate open technology standards that place control into clients’ hands. By kickstarting an open and participatory cloud, partners hold the pen to write the next chapter in Europe’s digital journey.