Data sovereignty and residency laws have become common in recent years. But major clouds have always been set up to allow data to move freely between different locations, so over the last few years all hyperscalers have been able to offer sovereign clouds that can guarantee government safety. I started thinking about methods. For example, data never leaves a particular country. AWS announced its European Sovereign Cloud in October last year. Microsoft Azure Cloud for Sovereignty was made generally available in December.
Google Cloud's approach is a little different. Back in 2021, Google Cloud partnered with T-Systems to bring sovereign cloud to Germany. A few weeks ago, we also announced a new partnership with World Wide Technology (WWT) to provide sovereign cloud solutions to US government customers.
Now, Google has renewed its focus on data sovereignty. But for now, the focus appears to be on partnerships rather than building its own sovereign cloud.
Google Cloud's hybrid and on-premises story has changed significantly over the past few years. From cloud service platforms to Anthos, GKE On-Prem, and perhaps a few other long-forgotten platforms, Google Cloud is a company that wants to use its services and tools, but is plagued by regulatory, security, cost, and paranoia. People don't want to keep their workloads and data in the Google cloud. Google's latest effort in this area is named Google Distributed Cloud (GDC). It's a fully managed software and hardware solution that can connect to Google Cloud or be completely air-gapped from the internet.
Of course, we wouldn't be in 2024 if Google hadn't focused on AI in all of these efforts as well.
“Today, customers are looking for entirely new ways to process and analyze data, discover hidden insights, improve productivity, and build entirely new applications, with AI at the core.” said Vithal Shirodkar, Vice President/General, Regional Expansion. , Google Cloud in an announcement Tuesday. “However, data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and low-latency requirements can pose a dilemma for organizations looking to deploy AI in the cloud. , the need to ensure rapid response can make it difficult to take advantage of the cloud's inherent benefits such as innovation, scalability, and cost efficiency.”
At Cloud Next, Google Cloud's annual developer conference, GDC gets a number of updates including new security features (in partnership with Palo Alto Networks), support for Apigee API management services, and more. Developers can now use Google Cloud's GDC Sandbox to build and test applications without interacting with physical hardware. Just as important as these new features is that GDC is now ISO27001 and SOC2 compliant.
On the hardware side, Google Cloud is introducing new AI servers for GDC. These are powered by Nvidia's L4 Tensor Core GPUs and are now available in addition to his existing GDC AI-optimized servers with high-performance Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Another interesting aspect of the GDC digital sovereignty story is that Google Cloud is highlighting partners T-Systems, WWT, and Clarence that can deliver a GDC-powered sovereign cloud on behalf of its clients.