Rackspace Technology has become the latest company to leverage sovereign cloud services as a product offering, in this case specifically aimed at supporting workloads in the UK public sector and other regulated services.
Aligning with the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and other UK regulatory bodies, Rackspace's 'UK Sovereign Services' platform will provide dedicated computing and storage 'Pods' for various sectors.
With segregation between each module, Rackspace said it will provide a “cost-effective hosting solution” for customers designed to deliver high levels of data and workload security.
As this platform focuses on public sector cloud workloads, this separation is key to ensuring that UK healthcare, government and law enforcement agencies do not operate with disk or cloud workloads. overlapping computing.
Government agencies must strictly adhere to regulatory compliance measures, so operating sovereign cloud services helps ensure they can do so more easily while benefiting from reduced cybersecurity risk.
“Digital independence and sovereignty within the UK have become key requirements of the public sector and many other regulated industries,” said Rick Martire, managing director of sovereign services at Rackspace.
“This truly digital offering from Sovereign enables the UK public sector to achieve cost and compliance savings through a single provider, without compromising security or performance,” he added.
Cloud sovereignty in the spotlight
Cloud sovereignty has been a recurring topic of conversation in both the UK and European Union (EU) over the last year, with major companies announcing several plans to introduce dedicated regional cloud services in a bid to comply with regulations.
While Rackspace's new offering raises the issue of cloud services sovereignty more strongly in the UK market than in the EU, it still leaves a clear impression regarding the growing global focus on sovereignty in cloud computing.
Microsoft was one of the first notable voices in the space, Revealing plans for its EU data caps solution that would see phased implementation in January 2023.
The idea behind this data cap, which would be set first for public sector and commercial customers, was to allow users the ability to store and process customer data within the European Union (EU).
Microsoft then increased its commitment to sovereign cloud requirements. in January 2024, expanding the EU's processing capabilities to include data found in records generated by the system.
More recently, IBM announced the launch of a data center in Germany that promised to ensure a higher level of data sovereignty for European customers.quickly followed by Oracle presentation of its 'Sovereign Cloud' region.
Oracle announced that its new region would pave the way for public and private sector organizations across the EU to gain a greater level of control over data sovereignty and privacy requirements.
Nvidia also looked to the EU as a focus and partnered with Scaleway to drive greater availability of sovereign infrastructure in the region..
