US tech giant Microsoft has announced a new set of cloud services specifically aimed at European governments and organizations that want to maintain full control over their data and ensure compliance with strict European regulations.
In an official statement, the company repeatedly used the words “sovereignty” and “sovereign,” reflecting concerns among political and technology leaders outside the US about the dominance of American companies.
The biggest news is that access to cloud systems in the EU will be controlled solely by Europe. This means that only European personnel will be able to manage remote access to leased hardware resources for data storage and processing.
The Sovereign Public Cloud product ensures that customer data remains in Europe, under European law, and that access and operations are controlled by European experts, with encryption entirely in the hands of customers.
“All remote access by Microsoft engineers to your data storage and processing systems in Europe is approved and monitored in real time by European employees and recorded in an immutable log,” the company said.
In addition, customers will be able to use local, isolated versions of office software such as Exchange and SharePoint in their own data centers, giving them complete control over security, compliance, and management.
This option is aimed at governments, critical industries, and regulated sectors that must meet the highest requirements for data localization, operational autonomy, and isolated access.
Microsoft promises that the new products will be available by the end of the year.
This move follows a commitment in April to expand data centers in 16 European countries, build an artificial intelligence ecosystem on the continent, and collaborate with European cloud service operators.
American companies dominate about 70-80% of the cloud services market in Europe. 
At the same time, France is working particularly hard to develop European alternatives that will protect data from access by the US government.
US law allows Washington to demand access to data stored on private company servers, even if they are outside the US.
In this context, the German province of Schleswig-Holstein announced on Thursday that it would remove Microsoft software from its systems later this year. | BGNES, AFP