VMware has established a Sovereign Cloud initiative to help governments and regulated industries to identify and engage with trusted national or regional cloud service providers to meet their unique sovereign cloud requirements.
The newest VMware Sovereign Cloud designated partners are IONOS SE, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Sopra Steria AS, and TDRA. This brings the total to 14 participants in the VMware Sovereign Cloud initiative in distinct sovereign regions covering Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, and the United States.
“We are pleased to welcome new partners to our Sovereign Cloud initiative and see existing partners demonstrate momentum in meeting the sovereign cloud requirements of customers around the world,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of product management, cloud infrastructure business group, VMware. “New data services from Tanzu will enable all our VMware Cloud Provider partners, particularly, sovereign cloud-focused partners, to expand their data and application transformation portfolios and accelerate cloud adoption. This will allow customers to remain within sovereign regions and jurisdictional control while achieving cutting edge transformation at scale.”
Through VMware Cloud Director and its technology ecosystem, VMware said it helps ensure that sovereign cloud providers have a wealth of solutions to augment their offerings. Some key capabilities:
- Integrated Self-Service Sovereign Object Storage: Sovereign clouds require local Object Storage capabilities to meet the needs of data residency, a key pillar in sovereign clouds. Cloudian provides an integrated Object storage service that meets growing data volumes of national data and innovation in application development.
- Ransomware protection, backup, and recovery: Data protection is another critical aspect of Sovereign cloud as all applications and workloads can be targets for cybercrime. Ransomware protection from Veeam and Cloudian uses immutable storage and instant workload recovery to help protect sovereign environments and critical national data from being changed or encrypted.
- Key management services: Sovereign cloud environments require the highest levels of protection, with a core requirement for encryption and key management. Fortanix delivers an integrated data security platform that provides VMware Cloud providers’ customers more control over their security-sensitive workloads and simplifies partner key services with encryption, tokenization, and secrets management.
- Additionally, Fortanix provides VMware Sovereign Cloud customers full control and ownership of the keys within the VMware Sovereign cloud boundary. Fortanix DSM complements this with FIPS 140-2 level 3 certified hardware security modules and key management with regional level isolation and enables full compliance with specific data privacy/transfer regulations including Shrems II and GDPR.
