Orange Business is to migrate a major part of its IT infrastructure to its part-owned Bleu sovereign cloud venture.

The French organization will move 70% of its infrastructure to Bleu, the platform it formed last year with IT and consulting firm Capgemini. The cloud suite aims to provide Microsoft Azure services at the SecNumCloud 3.2 level, representing Europe’s most stringent sovereign cloud security certification.

Orange Business reported it evaluated more than 400 applications to determine their placement based on data sensitivity, with the most sensitive workloads remaining on its own Cloud Avenue platform.

Orange Business CEO Aliette Mousnier-Lompré said she expects the internal migration to serve as a model for clients considering sovereign cloud adoption, reflecting a growing need in Europe to weaken vendor-lock in after the EU Data Act kicked into gear in September.

Bleu, which has currently attained Milestone 1 in the SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification, provides Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure services exclusively for the French market.

This month saw enterprise tech giant SAP firm up its own sovereign Azure equivalent for the German market, Delos Cloud, with the signing of a mutual assistance commitment with Bleu for cross-border cooperation in times of crisis and emergency.

The partnership focuses on enabling Franco-German collaboration for early detection, analysis, defense, and remediation of cybersecurity incidents.