Sovereign Private Cloud: Resiliency, Security, and Control for Your Critical Workloads

As organizations around the world accelerate digital transformation, the cloud has become essential for delivering innovation, resilience, and security at scale. But for many public sector institutions, national infrastructure operators, and organizations in highly regulated industries, cloud adoption must also support a more fundamental priority: digital sovereignty.

We define digital sovereignty as the ability and agency of institutions and individuals to participate in the digital economy securely, independently, and with governance controls of their choosing. Microsoft is investing in digital sovereignty solutions to enable organizations with choice and flexibility in their sovereign approach.

In June, Satya Nadella unveiled Microsoft’s latest expansion to our cloud sovereignty strategy, Microsoft Sovereign Cloud, during the Microsoft AI Tour in Amsterdam, signaling our continued and accelerating investment in how we empower nations and industries to meet evolving regulatory and operational requirements. This announcement was followed by a detailed blog post from Judson Althoff, outlining the new capabilities in data residency, encryption, and jurisdictional control. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to start there: Announcing comprehensive sovereign solutions empowering European organizations.

Today, I want to zoom in on one of the critical pieces of that announcement: Sovereign Private Cloud and how it is designed to enable governments and industries to operate securely, independently, and at scale—even in disconnected environments. At its core, Sovereign Private Cloud delivers robust resiliency and business continuity, empowering organizations to maintain uninterrupted operations and safeguard essential workloads, even in the face of unexpected disruptions or connectivity challenges. First, let’s look at the infrastructure that underpins the solution:

Achieving Sovereignty at Scale, Anywhere

For organizations that require running certain workloads in an on-premises environment to meet resiliency and business continuity requirements, Azure Local delivers a powerful new option. This is a modular, customer-operated Azure deployment that can operate in both hybrid and fully disconnected modes, supporting mission-critical workloads wherever they need to run.

Azure Local enables organizations to seamlessly maintain access to mission-critical applications and data, helping ensure business continuity and operational resiliency even when disconnected from the broader cloud, such as in the event of a regional network outage or other unexpected disruption. Azure Local is also designed for global scalability, empowering customers across sectors and geographies to meet their unique regulatory, operational, and security requirements without compromising on performance or agility. It is particularly suited for scenarios where public cloud is not feasible: secure government facilities, government networks, offshore infrastructure, and edge environments with intermittent or no connectivity. It provides the Azure experience, including compute, storage, networking, and platform services, in a form that customers control.

To simplify operations, we have extended Azure’s management and governance model to the edge through Azure Arc. This means customers can manage Azure Local deployments through the Azure portal, enforce consistent policies, automate monitoring, and integrate with their existing security frameworks. The result is cloud discipline and agility, brought into sovereign environments.

Bringing Trusted Productivity to Sovereign Private Cloud

Building on the secure foundation of Azure Local, we are also introducing Microsoft 365 Local, an offering that enables organizations to run Microsoft productivity workloads on-premises within their sovereign private cloud.

Microsoft 365 Local supports core collaboration and communication tools like Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business Server, running on reference architectures powered by Azure Local. When combined with Azure Local, this solution benefits from the deployment consistency, operational control, and infrastructure simplification that Azure provides.

Together, Azure Local and Microsoft 365 Local bring together trusted cloud infrastructure, secure productivity services, and built-in security in a fully customer-controlled environment. While many providers focus solely on infrastructure or collaboration tools, Microsoft delivers all three—productivity, security, and cloud platform—in a sovereign, on-premises environment. This integrated approach gives organizations the freedom to operate independently, meet jurisdictional requirements, and maintain mission continuity, even in highly regulated or disconnected environments.

Meeting Customers Where They Are on the Sovereignty Spectrum

Sovereignty is not a static requirement. It spans a wide spectrum of needs depending on the industry, national context, and operational landscape.

A global financial institution may focus on encryption and regulatory compliance. And a government agency might need local data residency and transparent control over access and oversight.

That’s why our approach to digital sovereignty is grounded in choice and flexibility. Microsoft’s Sovereign Private Cloud is designed to help empower customers to shape their cloud on their terms.

Shaping Your Sovereign Future

Governments and organizations will continue navigating shifting regulations, rising public expectations, and mission-critical demands that vary by region and sector.

At Microsoft, we are delivering the most comprehensive set of sovereignty solutions, with integrated productivity, security, and cloud platform, designed to enable organizations to grow, compete, and lead on their own terms with more control than ever before. With Azure Local’s fully customer-operated environments, we are empowering institutions to define and achieve digital sovereignty on their own terms.

We will continue to expand these offerings, helping ensure our customers, especially those across Europe, have the options and assurances they need to operate with confidence.

With Azure Local and Microsoft 365 Local, you can now bring together capability and compliance, security and autonomy, innovation and independence—without compromise.

Discover Microsoft Sovereign Cloud

Read more in the Microsoft Community Tech Blog: https://aka.ms/PrivateSovereignCloudBlog