The global race for technology innovation shows no signs of slowing – but the conversations that fuel the race have changed.
A distinctive common narrative has emerged among our customer CIOs and CTOs, as well as our partners: How do you balance complex cloud demands – technical, legal, commercial and regulatory – that can slow innovation, in an era when speed is critical to win?
Broadcom is committed to meeting European organisations’ growing demand for access to scalable, secure and compliant cloud environments. We are enabling Europe’s economic competitiveness across strategic sectors as we support our customers’ ambitions in a rapidly changing world.
Enabling innovation through security, resilience and compliance
When Broadcom acquired VMware to build the world’s leading infrastructure technology company, it committed to making VMware products easier to use, buy, and deploy. Hock Tan summarised Broadcom’s approach in an interview with the Financial Times observing the key in the global race for AI is “to use your own data, train your own data and keep your data on your own premise.”
A vital solution to securely and effectively leverage data for AI is sovereign cloud. That’s why VMware Cloud Foundation has sparked such interest from customers – it combines public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security and resiliency at an industry-leading cost of ownership. It is the most compelling platform for organisations to run the apps they need and to keep their innovative edge safely.
Navigating the wide-ranging requirements of sovereign cloud
Rapid cloud adoption has had to compete in recent years with data protection rules and emerging regulations tied to AI. European governments have also enacted stringent national laws that govern how sensitive data can cross borders.
As Hock noted in his conversations with customers at VMware Explore Barcelona last year, “one message was clear: the strategic importance of data is fuelling demand for sovereign cloud services.”
How cloud architectures can work in practice and what needs to be done to help European businesses meet both their legal and customer obligations are challenges that Martin Hosken, Field CTO, Cloud Providers at Broadcom and Laurent Blin, Global Product Marketing Manager at OVHcloud, tackle in IT Pro’s podcast “Keeping data safe and flexible with sovereign cloud”. They discuss the rising demand for sovereign clouds and how businesses can embrace the cloud without compromising on their data sovereignty obligations.
A unified approach critical for European competitiveness
One of the most basic challenges facing sovereign cloud is the lack of a shared definition of “sovereign cloud” across the industry. This is in part because governments and private sector groups need sovereign solutions for different reasons. Many governments – such as the EU, Singapore and Canada among others – want in-country solutions for the sake of national security. Certain organisations seek out sovereign cloud for the control it provides over their movement of data.
Addressing this challenge forms the basis of new research on the state of sovereign cloud in Europe, authored by Johan David Michels of Queen Mary University of London. The report, titled ‘Sovereign Cloud for Europe’, and produced with support from Broadcom, unpacks growing opportunities for European CSPs in this complex environment.
To address the range of demands, and offer a true sovereign cloud product, Broadcom partners with local cloud services providers (CSPs) in each market, meaning the data is always processed and stored in-country.
This focus on locally-enabled cloud infrastructure is important in building a technology stack that gives European organisations the confidence to pursue innovative solutions in AI and computing in a secure, sovereign environment. By providing solutions that meet the specific European needs, whether they prefer to operate on-premise or in the cloud, Broadcom is enabling partners to grow, compete and navigate an increasingly digital and data-driven landscape.
Read more about Sovereign Cloud from Broadcom.