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WTF is Sovereign SaaS? VMware’s way to satisfy pesky regulators your cloud is local

Reveals closer ties to Equinix and Wipro as Broadcom finds new ways to promise peace

VMware has used the European edition of its Explore conference to outline a plan to package software for consumption as SaaS while keeping it out of the reach of the extraterritorial jurisdiction enabled by the USA’s Cloud Act.

The virtualization giant is already keen on sovereign clouds – clouds that run its wares and are operated by local companies. Such clouds matter because plenty of nations require data to be stored locally, for security or privacy purposes. VMware already has thousands of partners that operate clouds using its products so has helped them to make the little changes required to ensure they meet such requirements.

Plenty of organisations, meanwhile, worry that using American clouds exposes their data to US authorities under the Cloud Act. As the US Department of Justice’s Cloud Act FAQ states: “The CLOUD Act clarified that U.S. law requires that providers subject to U.S. jurisdiction disclose data that is responsive to valid U.S. legal process, regardless of where the company stores the data.”

That extra-territorial data grab can apply to SaaS hosted on US-operated clouds too.

Which is where VMware’s Sovereign SaaS comes it. The offering is a new set of application packaging tools and controls that allows software vendors to spin up SaaSy version of their wares to run in sovereign clouds.

Veeam and Cloudian have signed up to play because their customers can get cloudy elastic backups and no CLOUD Act complications. VMware will court other software vendors to expand its offerings. The company has already made sure its own Greenplum analytics product is ready for deployment as sovereign SaaS for those who don’t want data they analyse to go offshore.

Also at Explore Europe, VMware announced its core stack is now offered on Equinix’s “Metal” bare metal IaaS service. Doing so means VMware now has deep partnerships with almost every cloud that matters: AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, and OVH have already signed up for Virtzilla-coloured clouds.

Another announcement saw Indian services giant Wipro reveal a business unit dedicated to VMware. That unit gets to play with improved automation in Virtzilla’s end-user computing suite, and an Extended Detection and Response capability added to the Carbon Black security range. VMware’s HCX workload migration range was also updated and appears to now have a subscription offering too.

All of the above is very much on-strategy for VMware.

Meanwhile Broadcom, which is working through its acquisition of VMware, continues to point out that it likes what it sees and will ensure VMware can continue doing what it does best.

The company is doing that with stilted advertorials, like this one, that talk up Broadcom’s history of growth and CEO Hock Tan’s belief that VMware will adorn his company’s software business and enable it to achieve similar success. ®

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