Sovereign by Design: designing for security, compliance, and control in the AI cloud era 

Many claimed “sovereign systems” are legacy solutions with minimal innovation, assembled from a patchwork of vendors or locked-in public cloud stacks that are reverse-engineered for security and sovereignty. In contrast, we believe “sovereign-by-design” systems should represent:

• Data and operational sovereignty controls applied at the network, compute, and storage foundations– not bolted on after the fact

• Durable control over how their data and systems operate, regardless of geography, connectivity, or geopolitical uncertainty

• IT infrastructure that is purpose-built for air-gapped or disconnected operations that leverage modern AIOps and cloud capabilities with embedded security, compliance, and data residency

This is what we mean by sovereign by design. And it is the standard we believe modern IT infrastructure must meet.

Edge-to-cloud digital sovereignty from packet ingress to workload execution

While it’s impossible to anticipate geopolitical shifts, HPE did anticipate the value of private infrastructure and data when launching GreenLake in 2017. We understood that organizations need to control their data and modernize how on-premises solutions are deployed and consumed. Since then, our focus has been delivering cloud-like experiences and innovation to customers across private cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Nearly a decade later, HPE leads in sovereign-by-design solutions with deployment flexibility, innovation, and control through GreenLake. We have implemented sovereign-by-design approaches across all critical elements - network, compute, storage, and GreenLake cloud - to maximize control and security as part of the industry's broadest edge-to-cloud digital sovereignty capabilities.

In just the past 10 months, HPE has introduced numerous solutions that preserve full data sovereignty and air-gapped operational autonomy that meet today’s requirements.

• Private Cloud: HPE brought air-gapped deployments to HPE Private Cloud Enterprise and HPE Private Cloud AI. With HPE Private Cloud AI, enterprises can deploy an isolated, data sovereign turnkey AI system designed to rapidly prototype, integrate and deploy AI training to inferencing workloads. While Private Cloud Enterprise provides similar benefits for more traditional and sensitive enterprise workloads. 

• Sovereign AI factories: For secure nation-scale AI initiatives, HPE’s Sovereign AI factory meets the most stringent scale and system hardening demands with HPC and rack-scale systems that incorporate customized hardening, secure supply chain, and certification testing to comply with requirements of many sovereign entities. In Grenoble, France, HPE and NVIDIA are establishing an EU-based AI factory lab, allowing customers to validate and test performance on infrastructure physically located and operated within the EU.

• Networks and Data Storage: In the networking and storage arenas, HPE significantly revamped its sovereign-ready infrastructure offerings with the introduction of HPE Aruba Networking Central On-Premises 3.0 and HPE Alletra Storage MP Disconnected. Both solutions provide air-gapped AI and cloud-native management and control planes designed for secure government, defense and corporate IT infrastructure designs. 

These examples incorporate the latest cloud-native microservices, advanced orchestration and runtime environments, AI-optimized data warehousing, inference capabilities, and GPUs with robust defense-in-depth designs, all created specifically to operate without external connectivity dependencies.

Global customers with sovereign directives 

With these recent advancements, HPE’s sovereign-by-design solutions have rapidly gained traction and market interest across organizations seeking to innovate with robust digital sovereignty and compliance guardrails.

Sovereign AI factories in action: Customers such as Carbon3.ai in the UK and the University of Utah in the US are advancing their major AI initiatives with HPE. Both are leveraging sovereign-by-design AI factory solutions to handle AI processing and discovery.  More specifically, Carbon3.ai is leveraging HPE Private Cloud AI to help prototype, accelerate, and adopt AI innovations for UK enterprises with a system design that incorporates country-specific compliance requirements.

Sovereign clouds for nations: This past November, the United States Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) announced the selection of HPE GreenLake to modernize its digital and AI platform service capabilities. HPE will deliver a secure, NIST-compliant private cloud environment with on-premises air-gapped management leveraging HPE Private Cloud Enterprise. This sovereign cloud deployment not only provides robust data residency but ensures true data ownership to DISA.

We have also begun broad deployments of private hyperconverged systems and air-gapped network and storage management infrastructure across the Americas, EU, UK, Middle East, and Asia. We are seeing significant interest from international research universities - often aligned with nationally sponsored research projects; highly regulated financial institutions; blue-chip high-tech companies with significant R&D operations and corporate IP; and the global defense sector.