Microsoft is further expanding Microsoft Sovereign Cloud. A Sovereign Control Panel is on the way, external key management via Azure Managed HSM is now generally available, and GitHub Enterprise Local and Foundry Local are coming to Azure Local. In addition, customer-managed environments will gain support for multitenancy.
Microsoft today announced the next phase of Microsoft Sovereign Cloud. The company introduced this portfolio last year for governments, critical infrastructure, and regulated sectors. The starting point is the workload. Not every application needs to run in the same deployment model: customers decide on a per-workload basis whether to choose the Sovereign Public Cloud, the Sovereign Private Cloud, or the Sovereign Partner Ecosystem.
Douglas Phillips, President and CTO of Microsoft Specialized Clouds, notes that organizations are looking at more than just the location of their data. They also want to know who can access their systems and whether critical services will keep running when geopolitical or network conditions change. “Digital sovereignty should give organizations greater control and security over the technology they depend on, while continuing to innovate,” says Phillips.
Greater visibility into control in the public cloud
In November, the Sovereign Control Panel will enter public preview. This dashboard in the Azure portal shows the status of an environment’s sovereignty. It identifies gaps and risks and maps out workload dependencies. For customers in the EU and EFTA, Microsoft is rolling out Data Guardian. This allows a European partner to monitor when Microsoft engineers remotely log in to production systems. Production Touch Ledger records this access in logs that cannot be altered without being detected.
In addition, external key management with Azure Managed HSM is now generally available. Customers can store the root key on their own hardware or with a trusted third party. Azure Confidential Clean Rooms, for collaborative analysis of sensitive data, is in limited preview.
Development and AI on on-premises hardware
On the private side, more of the application stack is moving to Azure Local. DocumentDB and Blob Storage are entering public preview. GitHub Enterprise Local will also become generally available in November as a validated appliance, allowing developers to connect GitHub Copilot to locally hosted models. Foundry Local will also become generally available then, featuring models from Microsoft, partners, and the open-source community. Through Microsoft 365 Local, currently in preview for approved customers, this also works with on-premises SharePoint and Exchange servers.
Confidential VMs on Azure Local are already generally available. Migrating workloads from a connected to a disconnected environment is now available in public preview. Notably, multitenancy is coming: multiple tenants will soon share the same underlying infrastructure. This will enable local service providers to offer their own sovereign cloud services on Azure Local.
The partner ecosystem includes 29 companies, such as Bleu, Delos Cloud, Mistral, Nvidia, Cronos Group, and Inspark.
Tip: SAP Cloud Infrastructure is a European sovereign competitor to AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud