Google carves out cloudy safe spaces for nations nervous about America's reach Google has updated its sovereign cloud services, including an air-gapped solution for customers with strict data security and residency requirements, as customers grow uneasy over US digital dominance. The tech giant first detailed a sovereign cloud capability some years ago, partnering with T-Systems in Germany to offer this …
Hmmm Left side of the Pond says I can give you sovereign data center hosting on the Right side of the Pond...As a former C programmer (and American living in the Pond (OK 35 miles from the mainland on a spit of sand called "Cape Cod")) I can't really see how this "compiles".
It would need:
Data centres to be owned and managed by a franchisee company in the country or bloc to which services are to be provided.
Owners and managers should be citizens of the same.
The contract between the franchisee and Google (or Microsoft etc) should be subject to the law of the same and signed there.
The contract should stipulate that the franchisor should have no access to data hosted by the franchisee or to the franchisee's customers
The contract should stipulate that the franchisee is under no obligation to provide hosted data or information about its customers or to the franchisor
The contract should stipulate that the franchisor does not have any authority to instruct the franchisee from providing services until the end of the franchise term.
The contract should stipulate that the franchisee is under no obligation to stop providing services until the end of the contract.
The contract should stipulate that the franchisor does not have any authority to instruct the franchisee to withhold services from any person or business who wishes to purchase services
The contract should stipulate that the franchisee is under no obligation to instruct the franchisee to withhold services from any person or business who wishes to purchase services
And probably more besides. It should be an operation completely hands off by anyone subject to US law. Arm's length would not be good enough.
by a franchisee company
Already a no go.
Owners and managers should be citizens of the same.
Security cleared and their partners, if they have.
Anyway, any tech should be in-house built and managed.
Handing out contracts to foreign corporation is direct admission that country is failing - to foster companies capable of building datacentres and "cloud" infrastructure.
Money that these corporations make as profit and shift offshore could train cohorts of homegrown engineers, help business grow etc.
" by a franchisee company
Already a no go."
Why is it a no go?
Microsoft for example went down this route before (some time in the mid/late 2010s) in Germany where they contracted T-Systems (part of Deutsche Telekom) to run some Microsoft services (not Azure, I think it was O365 etc) in T-Systems Data Centres run by T-Systems staff where the contract stipulated that Microsoft had neither physical nor remote access to those DCs and the data stored in those DCs.
Of course Microsoft did shutdown that particular arrangement after serveral years due to "lack of interest" from Germany companies.
This kind of setup is a deliberate legal fiction. A company offloads operations to a local partner, claims no access, and pretends it's no longer subject to foreign jurisdiction. But the intent is clear: sidestep legal obligations while continuing to sell foreign-origin services. Whether there's actual technical access is beside the point - the structure exists to provide legal cover, not real separation. Regulators may play along for political convenience, but everyone knows it’s a workaround dressed up as compliance.
It does not mean that there's a firewall in front of your network.
It does not mean that the network can only be accessed via a VPN, or via a "private" interconnect VLAN.
It means literally that there is *no connection at all* outside of the site. The only way to access it is to be physically present in the site, using local keyboard and screen. This is not something that can be meaningfully offered as a cloud service.
Decades ago, I remember reading some parody article talking about international finance, and I remember the line, "Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States of America (a wholely owned subsidiary of International Business Machines, Incorporated) today announced...".
In the 1990s, when Microsoft was being investigated for being a monopoly, I could only marvel, as Microsoft could only dream of having the influence that IBM had during its' heyday. Most people simply refused to believe the stories of what IBM did and got away with in the 1950s and 1960s. Staff at companies that leased IBM equipment were hesitant to report bugs in the product, because IBM could simply pull the lease, leaving the company without access to its' data. I've personally seen a mid level manager fired because he reported a bug, and the IBM rep said either the company fired him, or he'd pull the lease.
Microsoft was monopolistic, but they were nothing compared to the influence that IBM had, and the power they exerted.
And then Google came onto the scene. Just as people cheered Microsoft in the 1980s because it freed them from the oppressive grip of IBM, in the 2000s, people cheered Google from the oppressive grip of Microsoft.
Now Google is the oppressive grip. And where IBM's influence was over major corporations that leased IBM services, and Microsoft's influence was limited to the (at the time) under 10% of the population that had PCs, or more specifically the under 1% that were software developers, Google's influence is over anyone who uses the internet, and/or an Android cell phone. Which is to say, everyone.
People have tried to go Google free. A few have documented their efforts. They discovered that if you block Google IP addresses, you quickly find that your internet connection is useless, as so many backbone services are dependent on Google infrastructure.
And this is the entity that is proposing a safe harbour from the USA? That's like asking the wolf to protect you from the sheep. I wouldn't trust either of them, but when you think about it, the USA's threat is that it can use warrants (or other means) to gain access to the data that Google already has.
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