The importance of digital sovereignty in cloud data
What’s happening?
Digital sovereignty is increasingly becoming a major focus for companies and organizations around the world. In fact, 82% of global organizations are either currently using, planning to use, or considering sovereign cloud solutions in the next two years, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). At Cronos-Scale, we have seen this focus increase the number of requests we have been getting to advice our customers on how to ensure compliance with the authorities’ requirements while at the same ensuring efficient IT-operations. But to make matters even more difficult, Digital Sovereignty sometimes means different things to different people, and every country, region has its own requirements. And finally adding to the complexity is the fact that no standardized rules exists for the types of workloads, industries, and sectors that must adhere to these requirements!
Main challenges
We have identified some key challenges that we need to address when helping cloud users to ensure that data and applications comply with the laws and regulations of the country from where the data originates:
- Data Privacy and Protection: Different countries have varying data privacy laws and regulations. Ensuring compliance with these laws can be complex and costly.
- Skills of employees: Attracting and training employees to handle the requirements are difficult, as this is a new area of focus.
- Access Restrictions: Sovereign clouds often require that data and applications be accessible only to users, software, systems, and services within a specific geographic region or with specific security clearances.
- Cybersecurity Risks: There are concerns about unauthorized access to data by foreign entities, which can be mitigated by using a sovereign cloud.
- Operational Complexity: Implementing and managing a sovereign cloud environment can be more complex and resource-intensive compared to using a global cloud service.
- Regulatory Compliance: Organizations must ensure that their cloud services comply with local regulations, which can involve significant effort and resources.
These challenges highlight the importance of carefully considering cloud sovereignty when choosing a cloud service provider and designing a cloud strategy.
How can we help?
To efficiently help our customers at Cronos-Scale, we have built a comprehensible, standardized process for these analysis including building a Landing Zone that takes into account the local Sovereigny compliance requirements, while at the same bringing the company to the necessary flexibility that IT-systems need to support business requirements.
AWS has already announced plans to launch the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe, designed to help public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries meet their evolving sovereignty needs. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is set to launch its first AWS Region in Germany by the end of 2025. But until this Region is open, we are helping our customers prepare so that the analysis and architectural decisions have been made ensuring a quick implementation when possible.
We urge all companies and organisations – whether in the public sector or private, to start their planning of their Sovereignty requirements. To start training their IT-employees to be able to adjust the current IT-strategies so that the platforms required to comply with Sovereignty regulations are doing so. And finally to decide which platforms or data-areas are NOT influenced by the Sovereignty requirements ensure that those areas are quickly optimized and are kept as flexible as possible.
Would you like to learn how we can help you start your Digital Sovereignty analysis?
Get in touch with us!