Updated: June 17, 2025 (June 16, 2025)
BlogMicrosoft Adds more Sovereign Cloud Options for European Customers
Microsoft is adding a new Sovereign Private Cloud option to its set of cloud services available in Europe. It also is expanding its existing Cloud for Sovereignty service with new features for European customers and renaming that service to “Sovereign Public Cloud.”
Microsoft announced its new Sovereign cloud strategy for European customers on June 16. Earlier this month, rival AWS announced plans to launch later in 2025 a new European Sovereign Cloud company, designed to be locally controlled in the European Union, staffed by EU citizens and subject to EU laws. Last month, Google updated its own sovereign cloud services and added a disconnected, air-gapped option for customers with strict data security requirements, as well as a new Google Cloud Dedicated option for local and regional partner deployments.
Calls for European countries and customers to reduce their reliance on the biggest U.S. cloud providers due to fears of political and trade havoc have definitely hit a nerve with Microsoft and other leading cloud companies. Microsoft’s new sovereignty announcements come on the heels of it announcing five new digital commitments meant to reassure European customers that Microsoft has their back, in spite of the chaos caused by the current U.S. government regime with tariffs, regulation, threats over data access and more.
Expanding the Public Sovereign Cloud Footprint
Up until now, Microsoft’s Sovereign cloud offering, launched in 2022, initially was built to host Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure. Microsoft positioned it as an offering for highly regulated customers and government agencies throughout the world in select markets worldwide. At the time, Microsoft defined “sovereignty” fairly loosely; It was a term describing where data resided, but also applied to security, compliance, and policy requirements that were particular to various countries’ governments.
The Sovereign Public Cloud, currently in preview, is slated to be generally available in all European Azure regions in 2025. Sovereign Public Cloud is getting a new Data Guardian feature meant to ensure EU customers’ data is stored and processed exclusively in Europe and controlled exclusively by Microsoft employees based in Europe. The Sovereign Public Cloud also is now supporting customers and/or their partners who want to control the key management for the encryption of their data. Additionally, the Sovereign Public Cloud is getting a new service for administering the sovereignty functions called Regulated Environment Management.
“Sovereign Public Cloud ensures customer data stays in Europe, under European Law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel, and encryption is under full control of customers. This is enabled for all customer workloads running in our European datacenter regions requiring no migration,” Microsoft officials said.
Sovereign Private Cloud features Azure Local, Microsoft 365 Local
Microsoft’s new Sovereign Private Cloud offering is for those who want to run their apps either on site, in partner datacenters or elsewhere in their own country. Microsoft says it will support hybrid or air-gapped (isolated) operations, and is built on top of Azure Local, the product formerly known as Azure Stack HCI.
The Private Cloud option also supports “Microsoft 365 Local,” which brings Office server software like Exchange Server and SharePoint Server to Azure Local running in a customer’s own datacenters or sovereign cloud environments. Microsoft says Private Sovereign Cloud is for governments, critical industries and regulated sectors needing the highest standards of data residency, operational autonomy and disconnected access.
As part of its June 16 announcements, Microsoft also gave the existing set of Sovereign Cloud offerings run by select partners a new name. These are now called “National Partner Clouds.” Partners working with Microsoft on these clouds include Accenture, Crayon, Capgemini, Dell Technologies, IBM, NTT Data, Orange, Telefonica, Vodafone and more.
Directions on Microsoft asked Microsoft whether it plans to make these new Sovereign Public Cloud features and the new Private Sovereign Cloud offering available beyond the EU. We asked for any pricing and licensing details that the company can share. We also asked if Microsoft planned to make Microsoft 365 Local available outside of its Private Sovereign Cloud service. So far, no word back on any of these questions.
Update (June 17): A Microsoft spokesperson replied with answers to all three of our questions.
Regarding pricing and licensing information: “Microsoft’s Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud solutions are currently in preview and set to be generally available in all European cloud regions later this year. We will share more details on costs, if applicable, as offerings become available.”
Regarding making the updated Sovereign Cloud offerings available beyond Europe: “We are starting with 15 EU/EFTA countries and will add additional countries and regions, aligned to customers’ needs.”
Regarding making Microsoft 365 Local available outside of the Sovereign Private Cloud: “Microsoft 365 Local is a deployment and management framework that enables customers to run Microsoft productivity workloads like Exchange Server and SharePoint Server on Azure Local infrastructure. We are not announcing licensing changes for those products as part of this approach.”
