What Is a Sovereign Cloud and Who Truly Benefits From It?

You've heard about public cloud, private cloud, multicloud, and perhaps even poly cloud. But what about sovereign cloud, one of the latest, greatest buzzwords in the world of cloud computing?

If the concept of sovereign clouds is new to you — or if you've already heard of it but want a deeper dive — this article's for you. Keep reading for a look at what sovereign cloud means, how it works, which sovereign cloud providers are available today, and whether or not your business truly needs a sovereign cloud.

What Is a Sovereign Cloud?

A sovereign cloud is a cloud computing environment designed to help organizations comply with regulatory rules established by a particular government. This often entails ensuring that data stored within the cloud environment remains within a specific country. But it can also involve other practices, as we explain below.

Sovereign clouds have become a popular topic in recent years due to growing interest in the concept of digital sovereignty, one of the salient cloud computing trends of the moment. Digital sovereignty refers to the ability of an organization to retain control over its data and applications. Sovereign clouds help meet digital sovereignty goals in the context of cloud computing.

Why Are Sovereign Clouds Important?

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Sovereign clouds are important primarily because many businesses today face regulatory mandates that require them to control the physical location where data resides. For example, the GDPR places restrictions on the ability of companies to move some types of data outside of the European Union. In the United States, an executive order from early 2024 imposed similar rules regarding the transfer of specific types of data to foreign countries.

Traditionally, public cloud platforms weren't designed to make it easy to meet requirements like these. The greatest degree of control that they typically offered over where data resided was the ability to select specific cloud regions when deploying workloads. Most cloud regions are located in specific countries, but there are exceptions. And even if you can choose a particular region, you may not know exactly which state or city hosts your data.

In contrast, sovereign clouds offer strict guarantees about where data resides. In this way, they play an important role in meeting the data privacy and security mandates that organizations face today.

Benefits of Sovereign Clouds

The main benefit of sovereign clouds is that they let companies take advantage of the cloud without running afoul of compliance rules.

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Without a sovereign cloud, a company subject to rigid compliance rules regarding data residency (meaning the physical location where data is stored) may find it challenging to use the cloud at all. It might instead have to keep its workloads on-prem, where it's easier to retain tight control over them.

But with a sovereign cloud, organizations can enjoy the flexibility and scalability of the cloud, while also benefiting from more control than they'd have in a conventional public cloud environment.

Drawbacks of a Sovereign Cloud

If sovereign clouds give you all the benefits of cloud computing but with more privacy controls, what's not to love about them?

For one thing, cost. In general, cloud computing services on a sovereign cloud cost more than their equivalents on a generic public cloud. The exact pricing can vary widely depending on a number of factors, such as which cloud regions you select and which types of services you use, but in general, expect to pay a premium of at least 15% to use a sovereign cloud.

A second challenge of using sovereign clouds is that in some cases your organization must undergo a vetting process to use them because some sovereign cloud providers only make their solutions available to certain types of organizations — often, government agencies or contractors that do business with them.

This means you can't just create a sovereign cloud account and start launching workloads in a matter of minutes, as you could in a generic public cloud. There's a bureaucratic process you must go through to sign up — and you could be rejected if the cloud provider decides that you're not the right type of organization.

Finally, sovereign clouds sometimes offer fewer cloud services and features than generic public clouds. The differences in this regard are often not huge; expect to find the same core infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services, like cloud servers and object storage, on any major sovereign cloud that you could find in the public cloud. But more niche service types may not be available in a sovereign cloud. 

How Do Sovereign Clouds Work?

The exact features of sovereign clouds can vary, but they typically offer the following:

List of Sovereign Cloud Providers

Most of the sovereign clouds available today are provided by companies that also host generic public cloud platforms, offering sovereign cloud solutions alongside their standard offerings.

For example, AWS GovCloud is Amazon's sovereign cloud offering tailored to organizations based in the United States. Likewise, Azure offers Azure Government. Google doesn't have a sovereign cloud platform per se, but it offers a range of cloud services tailored for cloud sovereignty needs.

Many alternative public cloud providers, such as IBM and Oracle, also offer versions of a sovereign cloud. So do some private cloud infrastructure vendors, such as VMware.

Building Your Own Sovereign Cloud

You can, of course, build your own sovereign cloud from scratch. This would entail creating a private cloud environment with controls in place to meet whichever data residency, personnel validation, or other requirements are important for your business.

However, building a private cloud is no mean feat, and it's even more challenging if you need your private cloud to be sovereign. The easiest way to access a sovereign cloud environment is to use a public cloud offering designed for this purpose.

Who Needs — or Doesn't Need — a Sovereign Cloud?

No matter how you decide to implement a sovereign cloud, it's important to confirm that your organization actually needs one before committing.

Typically, only organizations that store or manage specific types of regulated data — such as data defined under the GDPR as personally identifiable information — can benefit from a sovereign cloud.

Other types of sensitive information — such as business secrets — may not be any more secure in a sovereign cloud than they would be in a generic public cloud, because sovereign clouds are designed for specific compliance frameworks. They're not intended to be more secure in general. Indeed, a well-designed, well-monitored generic public cloud environment can be just as effective at protecting sensitive data as a sovereign cloud, and choosing a sovereign cloud is not a substitute for following cloud security best practices.

Keep in mind, too, that there's no reason why you can't use a sovereign cloud and a generic cloud at the same time. You can use the sovereign cloud to store data that is subject to specific regulatory rules, while running other workloads in the less expensive generic cloud.