Helping build the digital future. On Europe’s terms.

Cloud computing is globally recognized as the single most effective, agile and scalable path to digitally transform and drive value creation. It has been a critical catalyst for growth, allowing private organizations and governments to support consumers and citizens alike, delivering services quickly without prohibitive capital investment. European organizations—in both the public and private sectors—want a provider to deliver a cloud on their terms, one that meets their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty, without compromising on functionality or innovation.

Last year, we set out an ambitious vision of sovereignty along three distinct pillars: data sovereignty (including control over encryption and data access), operational sovereignty (visibility and control over provider operations), and software sovereignty (providing the ability to run and move cloud workloads without being locked-in to a particular provider, including in extraordinary situations such as stressed exits). After extensive dialogue with customers and policymakers, we are today unveiling ‘Cloud. On Europe’s Terms’. As part of  this initiative, we will continue to demonstrate our commitment to deliver cloud services that provide the highest levels of digital sovereignty, all while enabling the next wave of growth and transformation for Europe’s businesses and organizations.

Google Cloud’s baseline controls and security features offer strong protections, meet current robust security and privacy requirements, and address many customer needs. Yet each country in Europe has its own characteristics and expectations. Certain customers in Europe may require more flexibility than current public and private cloud offerings may provide. We want to deliver a platform that allows customers to deploy workloads with the desired local control, without losing the transformational benefits of the public cloud.

We are now delivering on this new vision collaboratively with trusted local technology providers in Europe, starting with T-Systems in Germany. Today, together with T-Systems, we announced a partnership to build a Sovereign Cloud offering in Germany for private and public sector organizations. The offering will become available in mid 2022 with additional features being added over time.  

In this new joint offering, T-Systems will manage sovereignty controls and measures, including encryption and identity management of the Google Cloud Platform. In addition, as part of their offering, T-Systems will operate and independently control key parts of the Google Cloud infrastructure for T-Systems Sovereign Cloud customers in Germany.

We are committed to building trust with European governments and enterprises with a cloud that meets their digital sovereignty, sustainability and economic objectives. We are starting with T-Systems today and will continue by partnering with trusted technology providers in selected markets across the region. 

Customers in other markets across Europe will be able to use these trusted partner offerings or use Google Cloud’s controls to exercise autonomous control over data access and use; exercise choice over the infrastructure that is used to process that data; and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. 

With Google Cloud, our customers also automatically benefit from sustainable business transformation on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Today, we are the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, and by 2030, we aim to operate entirely on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all of our cloud regions worldwide. 

We’ll continue to listen to our customers and key stakeholders across Europe who are setting policy and helping shape requirements for customer control of data. Our goal is to make Google Cloud the best possible place for sustainable, digital transformation for European organizations on their terms—and there is much more to come.