Microsoft expands Sovereign Cloud offerings with three major updates

Microsoft has announced three enhancements to its Sovereign Cloud offerings, enabling organisations in regulated and secure environments to maintain full operational control and resilience — even when completely disconnected from the cloud.

The three major updates announced today provide a full-stack solution spanning infrastructure, productivity tools, and AI capabilities.“The Microsoft Sovereign Cloud brings together productivity, security and cloud workloads to span both public and private environments. Customers can choose the right control posture for each workload, through a continuum of sovereign options protecting against fragmenting their architecture or increasing operational risk.

Trust is built on confidence: confidence that data stays protected, controls are enforceable and operations can continue under real-world conditions,” the company said.

Three updates coming to Microsoft Sovereign Cloud

Azure Local disconnected operations (now available): Microsoft says that organisations can now run mission-critical infrastructure with Azure governance and policy control, with no cloud connectivity, optimising continuity for sovereign, classified or isolated environments.

Microsoft 365 Local disconnected (now available): Core productivity workloads, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business Server can run fully inside the customer’s sovereign operational boundary on Azure Local, Microsoft said, adding that it can keep teams productive even when disconnected from the cloud.Thirdly, Foundry Local adds modern infrastructure capabilities and support for large AI models which means organisations can now bring large AI models into fully disconnected, sovereign environments with Foundry Local. Using modern infrastructure from partners like NVIDIA, customers with sovereign needs will now be able to run multimodal models locally on their own hardware, inside strict sovereign boundaries enabling powerful, local AI inferencing in fully disconnected environments.“This delivers a truly localized full stack experience built on Azure Local infrastructure and Microsoft 365 Local workloads, designed to stay resilient across any connectivity condition, with large models being part of Foundry Local extending the stack to run advanced multimodal models locally, securely, even when fully disconnected. Customers can now help maintain uninterrupted operations, keep mission critical workloads protected and apply consistent governance and policy enforcement, while keeping data, identities and operations within their sovereign boundaries,” Microsoft added.