Sovereign cloud stands out as a major trend at VMware Explore Europe 2022

Tietoevry was present in two panel discussions on How Sovereign Cloud partners are Addressing Market and Customer Needs & Data Sovereignty in the Cloud Provider landscape, highlighting the various challenges of data sovereignty and how they are overcome.Yours truly and Francisco Romero, Head of Sovereign Cloud Service offering were present in these discussions where we covered the maturity of Sovereign Cloud, including customer perspectives and competence, as well as portfolio expansion with Sovereign Solutions, and each partner including Tietoevry gave their perspective on Sovereign Cloud in their region and how they are leading the industry in their respective regions.

Tietoevry also contributed with a breakout session presenting a concrete customer case; Norrbotten county municipalities have been able to start their journey by putting the right data in the right cloud with the right level of sovereignty. The full attendance in them was fully engaged throughout the session, and there was no doubt that a need for this kind of solution resonates in the market.

This customer case was also presented at Radar Summit 2022 in Stockholm, the Nordic’s most important meeting place for Tech and IT latest trends, during the same week with good engagement from the audience.

Here are my key takeaways from Sovereign Cloud-related topics generally from the conference in Barcelona:

• According to what the CEO of VMware, Raghu Raghuram, stated in his keynote: As organisations notice multi-cloud environment provides them a choice of clouds—sovereign and global—in which to run their apps, they’ve encountered a big spike in complexity, security challenges, and a skills shortage. Despite the challenges, organizations have accelerated multi-cloud use, adopting a “Cloud Smart” approach, with flexibility and choice across multiple clouds would be a natural next step. Cloud-smart organisations have benefitted from their multi-cloud operations noting their enhanced competitiveness and top-line results.  

• There is no data sovereignty without cloud sovereignty. And sovereignty does not have to come at the expense of cloud innovation,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president, cloud provider platform solutions, VMware. “With our new sovereign cloud innovations, we’re again setting the agenda by bringing SaaS services into sovereign environments. This will enable customers innovate and drive digital transformation while reducing the risk of unlocking the value of data.
• VMware promises that sovereign cloud services will continue to see expansion through its cloud partners, to ease the process of maintaining data compliance and data protection across cloud services
  
  

Harnessing all the power of the cloud. In a Nordic way, the sovereign way

We have now established foundational sovereign cloud capabilities in our Nordic data center network for our customers and are actively taking existing and new customers to this new modern solution.

According to a new research conducted by VMware reveals that during the next two years, 96% of all companies surveyed expect data will be a source of income, with 50% believing it would be a substantial revenue source. As economic uncertainty grows, it's no surprise that more corporate executives are focusing on data as an untapped revenue stream. However, the disadvantage is equally significant: respondents ranked data sovereignty as one of the key challenges facing organizations with 95% admitting it is a concern. Organisations that fail to comply with data-sovereignty requirements sometimes face fines in the hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as brand reputation harm as a result of data breach. Today, over 100 countries have their own rules defining how data should be maintained and retained within their borders, and the majority of these policies are continually changing. Tietoevry Sovereign Cloud makes sure that you put the right data in the right cloud with the right level of sovereignty. Get a free trial of the solution and try it yourself for 30 days here.

We also spoke with VMware top executives, such as Rajeev Bhardwaj and Ajay Patel, about the joint commitment to push forward an Application Modernization factory for Nordic municipalities, building on the experience with Norrbotten municipalities and the possibility to enable the sharing of common cloud-native PaaS patterns and SaaS application on top of Tanzu Application Platform to accelerate the development of digital local e-services with sovereign cloud assured digital trust for the citizens in the Nordics.

_{With Ajay Patel, SVP Modern Application Platform Business VMware and Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware}

In a conclusion, a very rounded event where Tietoevry demonstrated thought leadership in digital sovereignty as one of the most forward-looking sovereign cloud partners of VMware in Europe.