Cloud of trust: OVHcloud has launched its offer

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A good start for the trusted cloud in France. OVHcoud is selling its private cloud offering labeled SecNumCloud starting this Thursday, September 2, which should allow the digital transformation of the most sensitive companies. These are the health sectors, banking sectors, operators that are very important (water, energy, army, etc.), those that are essential services (telecommunications, etc.) and, in general, manufacturers, administration, the leading of state.

“We reaffirm our ambition to support the most important hosting needs of businesses and the public sector. This offer meets the highest standards of security and data protection. It works from new hypersecure datacenters, physical, IT, connected to a completely isolated and end-to-end encrypted network, ”ensures MagIT Caroline Comet-Fraigneau, sales manager for the French market at OVHcloud.

Encourage publishers and integrators to work for the state

Explanation. Sensitive organizations can no longer reasonably have their data and mission-critical applications hosted by public cloud giants. Because they – Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP – are American, that means they are subject to the Cloud Act, a law that gives anyone across the Atlantic the right to dig into our secrets. But, ironically, the size and durability of these service providers at the same time inspires the greatest confidence in companies, who are always afraid of online services that they are suffering from service breaks or cyberattacks that are likely to their activities cannot move.

The government therefore established a new doctrine last May: the Cloud of Trust. It stipulates that organizations will simply leave their own datacenters to go to a cloud without any Cloud Act and offer all physical and software security guarantees, as defined by ANSSI in its SecNumCloud certification.

OVHcloud, which hosts a third of French websites from its data centers in Lille and Roubaix, obtained this certification at the beginning of the year. This only applies to new rooms, one on each of the sites, separate from the previous ones, with dedicated electrical, IT and network infrastructure.

“We don’t yet know how many applications or data we will offer on SecNumCloud to host. The players we are targeting are organizations that currently operate with their own datacenters and in which the cloud is currently interested. just as a backup, ”commented Caroline Comet-Fraigneau.

“However, these companies are called to change, because there is a desire to offer more online services to citizens. The state has stood up for all new projects to be done in the cloud. This change is will be taken by software publishers already working in the State, but also by major integrators such as Capgemini, Atos and Sopra Steria. Our task now is to work more with these players than canvassing their clients, ” he added.

Servers under VMware dedicated to customers

So far, France has three major public cloud players – OVHcloud, 3DS Outscale and Scaleway. The first two earned SecNumCloud certification after long months of validating ANSSI services. But not in public offers in the cloud.

“Our SecNumCloud hosting offer matches the private cloud. That is, we do not market virtual machines. We rent exclusive use of physical servers that are preconfigured under VMware. Our customers use the computing power and storage capacity of these servers to deploy the number of virtual machines they want, ”explained the sales manager.

“Eventually, we hope to reject other SecNumCloud hosting services, typically public cloud and bare-metal. »

Caroline Comet-FraigneauSales manager for the French market, OVHcloud.

According to him, the use of ready-to-use physical servers for virtualization is the preferred option for SaaS application vendors. “Eventually, we hope to reject other SecNumCloud hosting services, typically public cloud and bare-metal. But these are long certifications that must be obtained. So we want to start with the most important hosting service for our partners. »

In addition to physical servers, OVHcloud provides its SecNumCloud offering customers with a KMS key device so they can encrypt all their content, whether it’s hosted content or content transmitted between hosts and of the company. The service provider ensures that these customers will also be supported by a dedicated team, which is available daily.

Companies do not have to buy from one operator a dedicated fiber that carries their data to OVHcloud datacenters. In addition to the encryption mentioned above, the host offers an optional private VPN network to secure exchanges over public links.

And then, more importantly, customers are warmly encouraged to take the redundancy option, which proved invaluable during the fire that destroyed an entire building and part of its neighbors in March. Redundancy consists of copying content between the Strasbourg and Roubaix datacenters. It includes another option: rent two different network links, instead of just one, between these two sites.

The ambition to export the model elsewhere in Europe

The 3DS Outscale is not as big as the OVHcloud; instead it built SecNumCloud’s private cloud hosting offering of industrial models, made using the tools of its flagship company, Dassault Systèmes. However, it seems to be hoping for an absorption effect: in conjunction with OVHcloud’s announcement, it has boosted its commercial offering by generating network traffic leaving its datacenters free and by unveiling the upcoming arrival of a new room. SecNumCloud is likely to welcome new customers.

“Above all SecNumCloud is a standard that guarantees security. »

Caroline Comet-FraigneauFrench Market Sales Manager, OVHcloud

But more than the supposed competition between OVHcloud and 3DS Outscale to host sensitive companies in their respective private clouds, the topic driving the two players is largely to influence across France’s borders, in order to offer a trusted cloud in European.

“In Germany, the federal government supports a program similar to SecNumCloud, the C5. At the European level, States are considering defining the EUCS. For us, it means the opportunity to export our model, ”said Caroline Comet-Fraigneau, reminding that the trusted cloud understood by European governments is not necessarily a national cloud, or even a sovereignty. “SecNumCloud is largely a standard that guarantees security.” It also differs from Gaia-X, which instead consists of defining interoperability terms that maintain sovereignty.

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