VMware today unveiled a new sovereign software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio and updates to its sovereign cloud, including the availability of the vendor's Tanzu Kubernetes orchestration platform on its sovereign cloud, which now involves 25 global partner cloud providers. These moves target data protection and compliance for modern cloud workloads in public sector and regulated industries.

"Data security and privacy is a foundation for every cloud, even sovereign clouds," Rajeev Bhardwaj, VMware VP of cloud provider solutions, told a group of reporters ahead of VMware Explore Europe 2022.

"We're seeing concern coming up from sovereign cloud providers and customers. First is around jurisdiction control, and this starts from the basic premise that foreign nations have access to the data that may reside on a sovereign soil," he said, citing the U.S. Cloud Act that gives the U.S. government control of data that may reside in a foreign nation.

Another area of concern for sovereign cloud providers and customers is geopolitical changes, and this is heightened by the recent events in Ukraine and Russia. For example, "I'm a sovereign nation, and my data resides in a different nation, and tomorrow the geopolitical landscape changes. Do I have access to the data?" Bhardwaj said.

These issues of jurisdiction controls and geopolitical uncertainty also spark worries "of the confidentiality of sensitive data, in terms of who has access," he added. Public sector and regulated entities alike have embraced the potential of the cloud, but those data confidentiality worries still exist.

The challenges with a traditional admin from a SaaS service on the market include data residency and jurisdiction control, along with being operated by potentially non-vetted citizens. To that point, VMware's new sovereign SaaS portfolio addresses "the limitations of a public cloud SaaS by ensuring that foreign nations cannot exert jurisdiction control of the data," Bhardwaj said.

The vendor's new portfolio of sovereign software services are delivered by partners using VMware software in their sovereign cloud data centers, which are entirely disconnected from public Internet. This is "how we deliver SaaS services in a sovereign environment," he explained.

The portfolio supports data residency requirements, which means no data or meta data leaves the country, "and also it's operated by providers in jurisdiction. The entire service is a locally-operated platform that sits inside the sovereign cloud," Bhardwaj said.

"This is something unique we are bringing to the market," he added. "VMware is leading the industry when it comes to sovereign cloud."

The tech giant also introduced its Tanzu Kubernetes portfolio for VMware sovereign cloud, delivered natively by partners from their sovereign cloud data centers. This integration enables enterprises to build, run, manage, and secure modern apps on sovereign infrastructure.

"We are making it completely sovereign. There is no dependency externally. The entire stack runs in a provider data center with operations, load balancing, and observability, all those capabilities integrated in the Kubernetes grid at the runtime level," Bhardwaj explained.

The Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Application Platform, Mission Control, and Data Solutions services are all available as part of the integration.