Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, a groundbreaking service ensuring compliance, security, and policy adherence, is now accessible across all Azure regions, spanning over 60 cloud regions, including South Africa, where the service launched in 2019. This empowers governments worldwide to leverage Microsoft Cloud while tailoring their usage to meet specific requirements.
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty helps governments meet their compliance, security, and policy requirements while utilizing the cloud to provide superior value to their citizens.
Before now, governments met their national and regional compliance requirements with private cloud and on-premise environments, for their applications and workloads, including governance, security controls, privacy, data residency, and sovereign protections.
The drawback for these on-prem applications is the costs to procure, configure, and maintain, with a resultant cost on speed and operational efficiency.
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty — offering governance, security, transparency, and sovereign technology — supports the digital transformation of government customers, unlike any other cloud provider in the world. Customers gain automation of best practices to address regulatory requirements while benefiting from the rapid pace of innovation in the hyperscale cloud.
Customers can address the issues of data sovereignty with policies dictating data and application confinement within defined geographical boundaries. They gain access to sovereign controls, ensuring the safeguarding and encryption of sensitive data through the utilization of sovereign landing zones, equipped with necessary privacy, security, and sovereignty controls, along with Azure Confidential Computing.
Azure Confidential Computing secures data in memory within hardware-based trusted environments, thwarting unauthorized access from other users. Notably, users of the sovereign cloud can monitor data access through the introduction of “Transparency Logs.”
Already adopted by the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) in the Netherlands, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is praised for enabling advanced data and AI capabilities, significantly reducing the time required for data interpretation and advisory production. Arnoud van Petersen, CIO & Head of IT Services at NCSC-NL, attests to the solution’s efficacy in delivering an EU-leading rapid response and information sharing in the dynamic cyber threat landscape.
According to Microsoft, the municipality of Amsterdam is also transitioning its on-premise workloads to Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. The service, initially offered in preview access in October 2023 with plans announced in 2022, reflects Microsoft’s commitment to sovereign cloud initiatives, as seen in partnerships in the UAE and Singapore, showcasing the company’s dedication to advancing secure and compliant cloud computing globally.
