Microsoft announces public preview of the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty addresses the sovereignty needs of government organizations and it is customizable to evolving local policies and regulatory requirements around the handling of data. Microsoft today announced the public preview of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is built on top of the Microsoft Azure public cloud capabilities, and it brings regulatory compliance and transparency into the cloud operator’s activities. Also, sovereign guardrails are offered through codified architecture, workload templates, localized Azure Policy Initiatives, tooling, and guidance. These capabilities will be needed for countries with jurisdictional requirements around sensitive data.

Microsoft today also announced new capabilities coming to Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, read about them below:

• The Sovereign Landing Zone and policy initiative now available on GitHub, which instantiates guardrails for sovereign cloud environments for customer workloads, enabling customers to leverage best practices for secure and consistent environments while supporting their efforts to meet evolving local regulations.
• Support for Italy’s ACN requirements and Netherlands BIO regulation which help customers more easily monitor, guard and report on their compliance in Azure.
• Transparency Logs, available to eligible customers, provides customers with visibility into key operational activities of Microsoft engineers to support customer service and service reliability issues.
• Automated workload templates for Azure Confidential Computing and Azure Lighthouse as examples for building workloads using these technologies for sovereign environments to speed learning and adoption.

Finally, Microsoft revealed that Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is expected to be generally available in December.