Improving Data Security, Privacy, and Compliance with Sovereign Cloud

In the first use case of this series, Stay in Control of Your Data with a Secure and Compliant Sovereign Cloud, we looked at what data sovereignty is, why it’s important, and how sovereign clouds solve for jurisdictional control issues. Now let’s take a closer look at how data privacy and sovereignty regulations are driving security, privacy, and compliance.

Data Privacy and Security

The EU’s GDPR has formed the basis of data privacy regulations not just in EU but around the world. A key principle of the regulation is the secure processing of personal data. The UK GDPR states that security measures must ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data (known in cybersecurity as the CIA triad) and protect against accidental loss, destruction, or damage.¹

Restricting access to sensitive and restricted data is a crucial aspect of data security, along with ensuring trust and flexibility for portability needs. 

Sovereign clouds are built on an enterprise-grade platform and customized by partners to meet local data protection laws, regulations, and requirements. Locally attested providers use advanced security controls to secure applications and data in the cloud against evolving attack vectors, ensuring compliance with data regulation laws and requirements to safeguard the most sensitive data and workloads.

Protected data should employ micro-segmentation with zero-trust enforcement to ensure workloads cannot communicate with each other unless they’ve specifically been authorized and are encrypted to secure them from foreign access. A multi-layered security approach secures data and applications in the sovereign cloud, keeping them safe from loss, destruction, or damage.

Sovereignty and Compliance

Data residency – the physical location where data (and metadata) is stored and processed – is a key aspect of data privacy and sovereignty regulations Data residency laws require that companies must operate in a country and that data should be stored in that country, often due to regulatory or compliance requirements. For companies that have customer data in multiple countries, it becomes a challenge to keep data secure. A sovereign cloud helps minimize risk and offers more robust controls and trusted endpoints needed to keep data secure and compliant.

In addition, data residency requirements continue to evolve and vary by country or region. Multi-national companies frequently rely on in-country compliance experts to help ensure they’re following the latest rules correctly and to avoid significant fines and legal action. 

With VMware, we provide best-in-class enterprise-grade cloud, security, and compliance solutions that provide the ultimate platform for data choice and control.

“A law can change, and it can change your entire way of doing business,” one Fortune 500 CISO said.²  And with the ever-changing geopolitical landscape, platform flexibility is needed to minimize risk with self-attested, trusted code. VMware provides simpler lift-and-shift portability and interoperability, as well as greater compliance with local laws and regulations.

Faced with changing regulations, it’s not surprising that compliance is a top cloud challenge according to 76% of organizations.³  One reason is a lack of skilled personnel. A recent survey from ISACA found that 50% of respondents said they experienced skills gaps in compliance laws and regulations, as well as in compliance frameworks and controls. Another 46% are dealing with a gap in privacy-related technology expertise.⁴

With these challenges, it’s not surprising that 81% of decision-makers in regulated industries have repatriated some or all data and workloads from public clouds.⁵  Some have moved data back on-premises, whereas others are using hybrid cloud architectures. 

With VMware Sovereign Cloud, solutions are provided by locally attested partners who provide full-service, sovereign solutions and ensure that compliance is achieved, implemented and configured. Sovereign cloud meets data residency requirements with local data centers to contain all regulated data, including metadata, and you can respond faster to data privacy rule changes, security threats, and geopolitics with a flexible cloud architecture and knowledgeable local experts.

Learn more about VMware Sovereign Cloud:

Next, we’ll explore data access and integrity, and how that can ignite innovation.

Sources:
1. UK information Commissioner’s Office, Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Security, accessed June 2022
2. CSO, Data residency laws pushing companies toward residency as a service, January 2022
3. Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report
4. ISACA, Privacy in Practice 2022, March 2022.
5. IDC, commissioned by VMware, Deploying the Right Data to the Right Cloud in Regulated Industries, June 2021