VMware is building a portfolio of sovereign SaaS offerings which, the comoany says, will enable partners to deliver sovereign SaaS natively using VMware software running in their sovereign cloud data centres, completely disconnected from the public Internet.
In this way, all data remains resident and exists only within a given sovereign region, with no access by foreign jurisdictions, and no data or metadata leaves the country or provider.
Rajeev Bhardwaj, VP, cloud provider platform solutions at VMware, said there can be no data sovereignty without cloud sovereignty, and that sovereignty does not have to come at the expense of cloud innovation.
“With our new sovereign cloud innovations, we’re again setting the agenda by bringing SaaS services into sovereign environments. This will enable VMware Sovereign Cloud providers to help their customers innovate and drive digital transformation while reducing the risk of unlocking the value of data.”
The announcements include VMware Tanzu on sovereign cloud, VMware Aria Operations Compliance pack for sovereign clouds, and new open ecosystem solutions.
Better protection, compliance
According to VMware, these SaaS innovations will enable partners to deliver services equivalent to those found in public clouds, but ensure better data protection and compliance, and that data stays resident within national territories.
With sovereign SaaS, VMware Sovereign Cloud Providers can build differentiated solutions to capture modern workloads, simplify operations with continuous compliance monitoring, and support data monetisation with lower risk.
“When people are looking for sovereignty, what they're really looking for is an assurance around various issues,” said Joe Baguley, VMware's VP and CTO for EMEA.
When people are looking for sovereignty, what they're really looking for is an assurance around various issues.
Joe Baguley, VMware's VP and CTO for EMEA.
One, he added, is that their data is going to be in a certain place. “And for those in regulated industries, this can be really important. In other ways, they might want to know that foreign law enforcement agents and others are not going be able to look at that data except under very specific circumstances, and if they do, they will be told about it.
“We also get to the extremes where some of our customers want, for example, a German data centre in Germany, run by German people, in a German building and suchlike.”
This, says Baguley, is why the VMware Sovereign Cloud Initiative is really a set of best practices and almost a code of conduct. “You could say that we've got people to start signing up so they can learn from us and learn from other sovereign cloud providers as to how they can build a more sovereign environment, rather than just building a VMware Certified Professional cloud up and running it.”
The VMware Sovereign Cloud Framework and associated capabilities that make up the VMware Sovereign Cloud Initiative are aligned with Gaia-X and other global data sovereignty regulations to simplify the delivery of sovereign clouds.
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