“Data is the new oil,” said British mathematician and data scientist Clive Humby in 2006. It’s certainly a valuable and coveted resource, but you need to be able to access and use it for it to be valuable. Now that we’ve covered the importance of data sovereignty, as well as security, privacy, and compliance, let’s take a look at the business benefits of data access and integrity with sovereign cloud.
Access to your data is critical!…without absolute access, your secure and compliant sovereign data is useless. A sovereign cloud provider ensures that data can be accessed quickly and securely whenever needed including sufficient backups, disaster recovery, data center connectivity, and secure networking to support their customers. Sovereign cloud providers should have at least two data centers, and to meet sovereignty, legal and regulatory requirements while being located in the jurisdiction where data is collected. This ensures the data is always available whenever needed, with 99.999% uptime.1
The other side of the access coin is preventing unauthorized or undesired access, which is one of the main reasons for choosing a sovereign cloud over a public one. Only the people and organizations you want to grant access to, along with local authorities, have the right to see your data. Not even the sovereign cloud provider can access your data – lowering your risk of cyberattack, chance of downtime, and persistent resources needed to keep your cloud up and running.
Restricted access also protects data integrity – the accuracy, completeness, and quality of data as it’s maintained over time and across formats.2 Integrity shouldn’t be confused with data security, even though there is a connection between the two. Data security is about protecting data from external and internal threats and maintaining privacy, which in turn helps ensure the integrity of data.
With authorized access to complete and accurate data, organizations can start to gain insights for improvement. Some may be reticent to perform analysis on confidential or restricted data for fear of an unintentional privacy breach, but a sovereign cloud mitigates the risk and presents new opportunities for utilizing data to uncover new insights, unlock value and fuel innovation.
Sovereign cloud solutions can enable secure, reliable access to data, giving organizations the power to drive innovation by unlocking the value of their data to drive digital transformation.
Sovereign cloud allows organizations in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, to conduct new and valuable research. One such example is a hospital in the UK that had previously been unable to analyze patient data due to privacy concerns. But after moving to a sovereign cloud, they were able to uncover new medical insights about COVID-19 based on the patient records of 2.5 million people.3
The insights available from analyzing sensitive data can fuel innovation and improve local economies. Shifting some business from U.S.-based public cloud providers (who control 66% of the European cloud market4) to a local sovereign cloud provider will also put more money back in the local economy.
The security, privacy, and control offered by sovereign clouds can also give companies greater confidence to operate both within and across national borders.
Learn more about VMware Sovereign Cloud:
• Download the Access and Integrity – 1 pager
• Watch the Sovereign Cloud Overview video
• Find and connect with a Sovereign Cloud Provider in your region
• Join the conversation on Sovereign Cloud on LinkedIn
Sources:
1. AWS Public Sector Blog, Achieving “five nines” in the cloud for justice and public safety, March 2020
2. Harvard Business School Online, What is data integrity and why does it matter?, February 2021
3. Unified Networking, Sovereign Clouds: Elevating Data Integrity to New Heights, April 2022
4. Toolbox, EU-US Data Flows Under the Spotlight: Here’s How Organizations Can Prepare, August 2021
