Sovereign cloud
Control your infrastructure with an open source sovereign cloud
Geopolitical tensions, evolving regulations, and new security challenges linked to AI have increased enterprises' needs to control and safeguard their infrastructure. Sovereign clouds built with open source components provide total control over your data, systems, and processing. Choose Canonical to build your sovereign cloud, tailored to meet your organization's individual compliance, data sovereignty, and operational needs.
Learn about sovereign clouds in our free, comprehensive guide.
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What is a sovereign cloud?
Sovereign clouds are more than a particular cloud architecture. Truly sovereign clouds adhere to a comprehensive set of legal, operational, regulatory, and technical requirements. This ensures that nations and organizations maintain complete control over their data and ownership of their infrastructure, mitigating reliance on cloud providers outside of their region and country.
A sovereign cloud also offers greater security for sensitive systems through cryptographic features and ensuring that only authorized individuals have access to infrastructure and data.
Levels of sovereignty in the cloud
Digital sovereignty in the cloud
Digital sovereignty refers to the technologies and services that empower organizations to gain and retain absolute control over their infrastructure and data. The specific level of control you require is dictated by your risk tolerance, industry regulations, and legal obligations. While many cloud options exist, a sovereign cloud offers the highest, most comprehensive level of digital control available.
The foundational level of control that cloud solutions can offer is data sovereignty: control over data residency and the security measures that protect data at rest, in transit, and during processing.
Only some clouds will guarantee control over where data is stored. This control is critical. Since data is governed by the laws of every region it touches, storing data in the wrong jurisdiction can create significant risks, and may even violate industry-specific and/or national legal or regulatory requirements.
Operational sovereignty combines data sovereignty with full visibility into the day-to-day management and maintenance of an organization's cloud. With this independent oversight, you can actively monitor security events, enforce regional compliance, and autonomously restrict access to sensitive systems. Hosted private clouds are a prime example, which provide organizations with dedicated, isolated infrastructure without resource sharing.
Software sovereignty is the ultimate level of control you can have over your cloud, providing data and operational sovereignty and extending control to the underlying technology.
The most effective path to software sovereignty is through open source software. Unlike proprietary solutions, open source offers more transparency into cloud components, and may provide opportunities to influence the roadmap. Only sovereign clouds built on open source provide software sovereignty.
Why build a sovereign cloud?
Reducing reliance on external vendors, mitigating security risk, and new regulations and laws are driving both private enterprises as well as governments and their institutions towards sovereign clouds.
Mitigating cybersecurity threats
Sensitive data, including military information and personal medical records, can be at high risk of cyber threats and foreign interference. Gaining control over both physical infrastructure and code helps you to support robust, safe operations.
Reducing dependence on foreign vendors
Sanctions, wars, infrastructure damage – many circumstances beyond your control could bring your cloud operations to a halt. Relying on global public cloud providers can create dependencies on foreign companies, potentially compromising digital autonomy.
Sovereign clouds help you avoid this risky dependence and take control of your digital future.
Meeting compliance and regulations
Many countries and entities have adopted data protection laws that mandate storing and processing sensitive and confidential data within national boundaries — a requirement which some public cloud providers can't meet. The NIS-2 directive and the DORA act in the EU, for example, are making some enterprises rethink their cloud infrastructure.
If your cloud vendor stores, hosts, or processes your data outside of your jurisdiction, it may be subject to the access and processing laws of the external national entity, potentially creating significant legal and compliance risks.
Gain control over the entire cloud and operations
Sovereign clouds provide you with control and greater transparency of personnel, staffing, and organizational access. For sensitive data, or highly regulated industries, this may be a necessary risk reduction strategy.
Improve resilience and disaster recovery
Standard clouds often mitigate disasters by failing over to international data centers. Depending on the relevant compliance requirements, this may violate local data laws.
By establishing geographically distant, isolated regions within the same national borders, sovereign clouds can ensure high availability and data recovery whilst mitigating legal risk.
How are sovereign clouds used in industry?
Public sector
Sensitive, personal, and potentially secret state information requires shielding to ensure the integrity of government services and protect national security.
Legal firms
Legal firms need to ensure that their highly confidential and privileged information is completely controlled. Entire cases could depend on it.
Health care
Medical organizations are tasked with safeguarding individuals' most sensitive medical and personal information. They also need to protect their operations and life-saving equipment against disruptions.
Financial
Financial organizations have regulatory and legal requirements to keep highly sensitive information safe from cyberattacks. A sovereign cloud provides these institutions more autonomy over their infrastructure and data.
Highly regulated industries
These are just some examples of the verticals that are taking advantage of sovereign clouds. The benefits of digital sovereignty extend to any heavily regulated industry that has a vital interest in controlling its infrastructure and guarding its data.
Building an open source sovereign cloud
Canonical's well-established open source components are backed by up to 15 years of long-term support, ensuring the enduring stability and reliability of your sovereign cloud investment.
Integrate our components into your existing stack, or combine them for a unified, end-to-end sovereign cloud solution.
Every cloud requires servers to support workloads. However, server management and maintenance can be hugely time consuming. MAAS lightens this burden.
It streamlines the entire hardware lifecycle, enabling automated and remote server provisioning, configuration, installation, deployment, and discovery, all in a single workflow.
Canonical Ceph helps to organize the data on sovereign cloud servers. Ceph is an elastic distributed storage system which combines block, file, and object storage at scale, making it a strong foundation for sovereign clouds.
Canonical Landscape delivers control up to the systems management level.
Landscape automates security patching, auditing, access management, and compliance tasks across your Ubuntu estate to keep sovereign cloud systems running smoothly. It helps organizations to remotely update and upgrade machines, as well as managing users and their permissions — on a single pane of glass.
Each element in Canonical’s sovereign cloud software stack is optimized to run on Ubuntu. Through features like AppArmor, File Encryption, Stack Protector, and UEFI Secure Boot, Ubuntu prioritizes user privacy and system integrity by default — which is key for sovereign clouds.
With Ubuntu Pro, enterprises get up to 15 years of security maintenance for thousands of open source packages, tools for compliance, and the option to add 24/7 enterprise support.
Canonical’s lightweight open source cloud, MicroCloud, is designed for companies without extensive on-premise infrastructure. It has a low barrier to entry, with automated deployment and on-site operations. MicroCloud helps you create a sovereign cloud in minutes, from a single node, to 50 node clusters.
OpenStack is a highly customizable cloud platform, used for everything from a regional public cloud, to an on-premise extension of the public cloud, to sovereign clouds.
Canonical Kubernetes makes building sovereign clouds across multiple environments that align with your compliance and IT requirements much easier. It provides a layer that makes data and AI applications portable across development frameworks, with minimal adaptations or configuration changes.
What customers say
"Where other infrastructure providers in Switzerland that use traditional technologies might charge customers a premium uplift per year, we can offer the same capabilities for ten times less while still achieving a better margin."
Thomas Taroni
VP of Product,
Phoenix Systems
"We needed a cloud solution that was stable, reliable, and performant. Canonical allowed us to do this by helping to design and deploy our cloud – and they helped us do this quickly."
Peter Blain
Director of Product and AI,
Firmus
"Knowledge transfer was another reason we chose to partner with Canonical. To minimize long-term operating costs, we don't want to be reliant on any third party. Canonical is giving our staff the training they need to be able to manage the cloud completely self-sufficiently."
Jahanzeb Arshad
VP of Operations,
Nayatel
"We wanted to consolidate onto a single, open platform. That way, we wouldn't be tied to a single vendor, and we'd be able to change parameters at will. The goal was to develop our skills so that we could work with any partner in one cloud environment."
Macdonald Chamba
Head of Infrastructure and Cloud Services,
Telekom Networks Malawi
Canonical offers cloud design and delivery at a fixed price.
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