Vasu Jakkal, Corporate VP of Security, Compliance, and Identity, Microsoft

Microsoft executives touted the tech giant’s ability to deliver comprehensive security during its annual Inspire conference. The latest addition is a cloud and data sovereignty service for the global public sector, dubbed Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.

“Today's geopolitical and economic climate, data sovereignty has become increasingly important for customers, especially in the public sector,” Vasu Jakkal, corporate VP of security, compliance, and identity at Microsoft, said during her speech. The new service can “allow public sector customers to have the full power of cloud capabilities — resiliency, security, and scale, while respecting the public sector sovereignty.”

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is built on the company’s public cloud to accelerate governments’ digital transformation, starting with its Azure regional data centers. The service helps customers meet regulatory requirements and implement policies to contain their data and applications within their preferred geographic boundary, the company claims.

“Customers can specify the country or region of the service, secure and control their regulated data, and operate with their desired controls and policies in place,” Jakkal explained.

“Microsoft has the most comprehensive compliance coverage of any cloud service provider with 100-plus offerings including more than 50 which are specific to global regions and countries,” Corey Sanders, CVP for Microsoft's industry and global expansion team, touted in a blog post.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty users also can benefit from the vendor’s threat intelligence capabilities that analyze more than 24 trillion signals every day to identify and protect against attacks, its executives noted.

To further protect data for public sector customers, Microsoft also introduced Azure Confidential Computing that “helps customers encrypt their data while it’s in use so trusted partners can now migrate customer applications that handle sensitive data to Azure without rewriting them,” Jakkal added.

Backed by threat intelligence, Jakkal boasted Microsoft has “the most comprehensive security portfolio in the industry” that covers more than 50 various categories across multicloud and multiplatform.

The company integrates those categories into six product families: Microsoft Defender and Sentinel for security; Microsoft Entra and Endpoint Manager for identity and device management; and Microsoft Purview and Priva for compliance and privacy.

“Together, these products work as one integrated solution being used by more than 785,000 organizations to secure the environment,” Jakkal said. “Customers can see a 60% cost savings by choosing our end-to-end solutions over a multi-vendor strategy. ”