
- Interest in establishing ‘sovereign clouds’ accelerated in 2024 and is set to continue this year
- Bharti Airtel is set to launch a sovereign cloud service in India in partnership with Google Cloud
Get used to the term ‘sovereign cloud’ because it’s here to stay and soon to become more commonplace in India, where Airtel Business, the enterprise services arm of the country’s second-largest telco, Bharti Airtel, is getting ready to launch its sovereign cloud offering in partnership with Google Cloud.
At first sight a sovereign cloud is a straightforward proposition: It’s a cloud that stores data exclusively within the user’s country of origin – no potentially dangerous links allowed. But, and this is the kicker, it requires very careful adherence to local rules and regulations and that’s less than straightforward, as regulations differ from country to country and are subject to regular change.
So designing and managing a secure sovereign cloud is a complex business and fraught with danger. Qualified cloud services are highly secured and constantly monitored and logged to ensure that standards are being met. One lapse in security that results in critical data leaking out into the wrong (foreign) hands, and the cloud provider could be on the liability hook for millions, not to mention severe reputational damage.
The favoured way to tee up a major sovereign cloud service is for a telco to partner with a big cloud provider. Prominent players of this global game include Deutsche Telekom and Google Cloud who established their sovereign cloud services joint venture in Germany in 2021; France’s Orange, which formed a joint venture called Bleu with Capgemini; and Belgium’s Proximus, which has also teamed up with Google Cloud to offer sovereign cloud services in Belgium and Luxembourg. For Luxembourg, Proximus has partnered with datacentre hosting provider LuxConnect;
Sovereign cloud services have risen in prominence because companies want to get the benefit of maximum cloud safety with the broadest possible array of available digital partners. Properly regulated sovereign clouds should be the answer.
As a consequence, ensuring that cloud and telecom facilities can claim data sovereignty adherence has gone well beyond an “onerous legal requirement” and has become a positive customer draw. Whether the customer be a government department or a corporate enterprise, support for data sovereignty is becoming a key requirement.
In Asia, data sovereignty and localisation has been an issue in a number of countries for several years as states such as Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam have enacted or planned legislation designed to keep certain types of data, especially sensitive personal data, within national borders.
The latest telco operation determined to ride this wave is Airtel Business, which has teamed up with Google Cloud to provide sovereign cloud services to Indian government and enterprises. Google’s experience with sovereign cloud collaborations in France, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand makes it a valuable partner for the Indian giant.
Back in May 2024, Google Cloud and Airtel pledged to work together on a joint go-to-market effort in India, combining Airtel’s connectivity and distribution with Google Cloud’s AI services technologies.
Airtel was to provide the go-to-market push with its suite of cloud managed services to its customer base of more than 2,000 large enterprises and 1 million emerging businesses. It laid out its plans and approach during a recent roundtable discussion, referring to the sovereign cloud service as Airtel’s ‘Own Cloud’, reported Pune News.
Google has already invested in Airtel, committing $1bn in 2022. And the cloud giant has also partnered with other companies globally on sovereign cloud offerings, working with Thales in France on a sovereign cloud. In 2024, Google was busy signing deals with Indosat in Indonesia, DNeX in Malaysia, and Gulf Edge in Thailand.
Airtel operates multiple datacentres across India through its Nxtra unit. The company is developing facilities in Noida, Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
With its new cloud venture, it promises stringent sovereignty compliance, including hosting exclusively in India and the use of AI to enhance operational efficiency. It claims it will target workloads that don’t demand too much elasticity, making the offer cost effective for many applications.
– Ian Scales, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV
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