Florida headquartered Vultr has launched a sovereign cloud programme targeted at governments, research institutions, and enterprises that need to comply with increasingly specific local regulations.
According to data from Capgemini, 52% of organisations surveyed plan to include sovereignty in their overall cloud strategy in the next year, with many focusing on data localization.
Similarly, data from Accenture notes that 50% of European CXOs list data sovereignty as a key issue when selecting cloud vendors, with more than a third looking to move 25-75% of data, workloads, or assets to a sovereign cloud.
Evolving regulations across the globe are a direct reason behind this push for data localisation and sovereign clouds. For governments and institutions with strict data regulation obligations, sovereign clouds allow for more sophisticated encryption and better adherence to regional law.
In March 2024, the European Commission was fined by the EDPS, as its use of Microsoft 365 did not align with data localisation laws.
The watchdog ordered the Commission to "suspend all data flows through the use of Microsoft 365 to Microsoft and any of its affiliates and sub-processors that might be located in any country not covered by an adequacy decision."
See also: EDPS: European Commission breached data infringement rules over Microsoft 365 use
“To address the growing need for countries to control their own data, and to reduce their reliance on a small number of large global tech companies, Vultr will now deploy sovereign clouds on demand for national governments around the world,” said J.J. Kardwell, CEO of Vultr’s parent company, Constant.
For enterprises, Vultr combines Sovereign and Private Cloud services with “train anywhere, scale everywhere” infrastructure, including Vultr Container Registry, which enables models to be trained in one location but shared across multiple geographies, allowing customers to scale AI models on their own terms.
However, it is not the only company to offer sovereign computing services. AWS has sovereign cloud services available in Europe, complying with EU regulation, while IBM offers Cloud for Financial Services, in line with banking sector regulations.
T-Systems has announced a partnership with Google Cloud for a sovereign cloud service, while Oracle and Orange have announced similar plans for business services in the recent months.
