British hosting biz DataVita has launched what it calls "National Cloud," a service offering clients data residency within the UK, and claims to have full transparency over costs, with no hidden fees or egress charges.

The company, which styles itself as Scotland's largest datacenter and cloud services provider, says that National Cloud has been developed to meet the challenges some organizations face when using the public cloud, positioning itself as an alternative to the big cloud operators.

DataVita has signed a deal with HPE for National Cloud, and in fact the service is based on the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. The company told us that HPE is providing the infrastructure, which is managed via GreenLake, claiming this offers flexibility in how it operates the service.

National Cloud is a public cloud service, though the company says that private/dedicated deployments are also available. It has been created to meet the needs of regulated environments by delivering secure cloud capabilities in a sovereign manner while promising complete visibility and control over cloud resources, and it appears to be targeting public sector customers.

"National Cloud is our answer to the recurring issues organizations face with public cloud services," DataVita Managing Director Danny Quinn stated. "We're actively seeking out workloads that public clouds can't efficiently support, particularly those driven by AI's growing demands and those organizations requiring intricate hybrid cloud architectures."

The company points to its use only of UK datacenters, saying this enables it to address compliance and security concerns for public services and regulated industries. It operates a pair of bit barns located in Scotland - one in Glasgow, another not far away in Lanarkshire - and DataVita told us it uses a network of partner facilities throughout the UK, but only those that match its sustainability requirements.

Omdia Chief Analyst Roy Illsley said there has been growing interest in sovereign clouds, with both Oracle and AWS building EU-specific cloud infrastructure.

"While the UK appears to be less interested in safeguarding our data, unlike the EU, I am sure there is demand for data residency within country. However, that is just the first step in ensuring sovereignty; there is data processing and jurisdictional control," Illsley told The Register.

"This offering sounds like it will tick the boxes for most of the core elements that are needed for a sovereign cloud. How much demand there will be in the UK is unknown, but my estimate is that approximately 15 percent of data might be classified as sovereign," he added.

Gartner Senior Director Analyst Rene Buest agreed there is a trend toward sovereign clouds.

"The reason for this is that sovereignty concerns are rising among customers of public cloud services in government and commercial organizations, especially in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia/Pacific, and China. Organizations in these regions are becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about their dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure providers," he said.

However, he added that decisions about cloud environments are not always linked to government regulations; they are often due to an organization's risk management, policies, culture, or business strategy.

DataVita claims it is already seeing interest from organizations "looking to escape the limitations of public cloud services" and "gain more control over their critical workloads and data." As well as regulated industries, it says National Cloud is capable of supporting the needs of medium and large enterprises, tech startups, and public sector bodies. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/29/datavita_national_cloud/