SAP customers will be able to achieve a new level of data sovereignty and independence by running workloads entirely within their own datacenters, the German ERP giant has promised.
SAP Sovereign Cloud On-Site is a new service launched in conjunction with the announcement of the global availability of the company’s Sovereign Cloud platform.
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In practice, this will mean local SAP or SAP certified personnel will manage SAP Sovereign Cloud On-Site workloads in a datacenter approved by the customer. Data handling, logging and key management will be managed and audited by the customer. Any third party providers involved will be required to meet the same standards of sovereignty to prevent backdoors caused by supply chain issues.
SAP has also made its Sovereign Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform available on a global basis for the first time, with a particular focus on the problems of European Union (EU) enterprises that want to run enterprise resource planning (ERP) AI workloads without having to rely on US infrastructure providers. This will allow customers to run SAP entirely within the EU to comply with the bloc’s data protection regulations.
The announcement’s final component is Delos Cloud, a data sovereignty service for the German public sector, run in conjunction with local partners, that is designed to meet the country’s stringent information security requirements.
Digital autonomy
Not long ago, organizations understood the idea of data sovereignty as being primarily about meeting the demands of regulation and legal compliance.
A range of developments, primarily geo-political in nature, have transformed this outlook. Now, sovereignty is as much tied up with the growing sense that operational, political, and even technological independence is essential, especially for EU-based enterprises.
SAP has embraced this concern. “The digital resilience of Europe depends on sovereignty that is secure, scalable and future-ready,” said Martin Merz, president, SAP Sovereign Cloud. “SAP’s full-stack sovereign cloud offering delivers exactly that, giving customers the freedom to choose their deployment model while helping ensure compliance up to the highest standards.”
This reflects the company’s commitment to supporting the EU’s “digital autonomy,” he said. The company has made digital sovereignty a strategic priority, and will invest €20 billion ($23.3 billion) to develop new digital sovereignty products for the EU as well as for other territories.
A decade ago, the idea of cloud services promoted the notion of a single global infrastructure market. Now it looks just as likely that there will be a balkanization of global cloud infrastructure into geographical domains.
“For decades, enterprises have handed over too much power to their cloud providers – power over infrastructure, power over availability, and most importantly, power over their own data,” commented Garima Kapoor, co-founder and co-CEO of US AI object storage company, MinIO.
“CIOs are realizing that outsourcing control to a public cloud provider is no longer an option. The concept of sovereignty is evolving. It’s no longer just as a means of maintaining compliance with data regulations but is now viewed as a strategic and architectural imperative for enterprises that want to own their digital destiny,” she said.
According to Kapoor, the appearance of services such as Sovereign Cloud gives enterprises a way out of an impasse. “SAP is giving organizations control over their data destiny,” she said.
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