Nordic IT firm Tieto signed up to a sovereign cloud framework from Orange Business.

The agreement centers around Cloud Avenue, Orange's sovereign cloud offering for the European market, with the agreement covering the entire Tieto group and to support its expansion in the Nordics and Europe. Specifically, Orange said Tieto would be able to leverage standardized and scalable services, predictable cost levels, and a standardized, efficient delivery model for its future build out.

Tieto's transition to Orange Business will take place incrementally over the next two years, with Tieto Banktech the first business area to adopt the services. The first migrations are planned for the second half of this year, with other business units to follow on their own schedules.

Launched in 2023, Cloud Avenue is Orange's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering designed for meeting data sovereignty, security and regulatory compliance. Served from hosted data centers in France, Germany, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, its French services have SecNumCloud qualification, a Franco-specific sovereign cloud qualification, with plans to extend similar to its other data centers.

In a recent conversation on sovereignty, Simon Ranyard, managing director for Northwest Europe at Orange Business, explained the platform in relation to Bleu, the platform it formed in 2024 with IT and consulting firm Capgemini.

"Cloud Avenue is Orange infrastructure built upon virtual machines using open source technologies and based across Orange data centers and hosted ones from the likes of Equinix," Ranyard said. "Bleu, meanwhile, is a joint venture that provides a sovereign cloud within France."

Ranyard also gave insight to the group's Scandinavian footprint, for example a broad outreach with the public sector in Norway and Sweden, where Tieto offices can be found.

Tieto claims around 14,000 employees focused on software, cloud, and AI supporting the region's digital backbone across a variety of functions. The firm plays a key role in Finland’s national security and critical infrastructure, including support for the Finnish Border Guard with border inspection and surveillance systems. In defense, more than 3,000 of its engineers work on NATO-standard communication and secure radio network software.

Beyond security, Tieto works with Siemens to manage Nordic power grids through the Gridscale X platform and its Tieto Banktech arm provides cloud-based core banking and payment platforms.

Speaking on geopolitics in the Nordics, Ranyard added: "I would say they are quite nervous about their northern border, and the people that sit on the other side of that northern border," further fueling the region's sovereignty drive. Compared to Ranyard's native U.K., he noted Norway, for example, as more sovereignty focused, especially for critical infrastructure.

"For an international organization operating all over the world, they can be very happy with being in a hyperscaler environment in terms of all the technological advancements that you get quickly, because obviously they develop new products and tools very quickly," Ranyard said. "But there are other companies, particularly ones that are part of the critical national infrastructure, who do not want to be in that environment and want to be in a more classical, private cloud environment where they know exactly where that data is, where they can tell the government where that data is, if at any point the government wanted to know."