Cloud Sovereignty: Feature. Bug. Feature. Repeat!

Like most big coal-engine moments in the timeline of technology, Cloud is also turning out to be suffixed with a paradox. Are Sovereign Clouds a fair-ask? Are they practically feasible? Is Sovereignty-washing possible? Is that happening? Let's lift some of these clouds today.

- By Pratima H

It's slow but it's happening. Cloud rollbacks are now much more than cost saving-attempts or back- to-comfort-zone shuffles. We all heard - in some way- about Basecamp's 37Signals pulling the plug on a big Cloud vendor in early 2023 hoping it will save $7 million in the next five years by going on premise. The figure started touching $10 million recently. But there's more to a Cloud exit than simply eking out dollars these days.

GEICO moved over 600 apps to the cloud over a decade but ended up with 2.5 times higher costs. Now they're moving back to private cloud. Dropbox pulled 90 per cent of customer data off AWS and built their own hybrid system, saving a lot of money. Adobe also shifted major parts of their infrastructure away from public cloud. There are many, many more examples of large enterprises doing the same - as told by Kunal Kushwaha, Field CTO, Civo in a recent interview with Dataquest.

India's own technology players like TCS are also seen dotting headlines like the NOW Telecom- partnered Sovereign Cloud in Philippines or the RailTel Sovereign Cloud (tagged as the India's indigenous sovereign cloud platform). There is also buzz about Ola's Krutrim's AI Sovereign Cloud for India. In fact, as per some recent BCG estimates, by 2028, as many as 65 per cent of nations are expected to implement a digital sovereignty plan. Sovereign-cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) spending is also expected to take a jump from $37 billion in 2023 to $169 billion by 2028. The reason lies a lot in regulatory push- from the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, France's SecNumCloud rules, to India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act. It also has to do with concerns related to data privacy, data control, cloud control, resilience assurance, security worries and business continuity needs. Everything, as we can decipher now, is boiling down to that counter-intuitive-sounding term- Cloud Sovereignty.