Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty in 2024 release wave 2

Overview

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty helps public sector and regulated industry customers build and digitally transform workloads in the Microsoft Cloud while meeting their specific compliance, security, and policy needs. Cloud for Sovereignty uses hardware-based confidentiality, encryption controls, tooling, and automation to establish the extra protection that governments require. It also provides tools and guidance to simplify, standardize, and improve confidence in the digital sovereignty of the public cloud throughout the cloud implementation lifecycle.

We're pleased to announce several new features we are releasing as part of 2024 release wave 2

We continue to improve the Sovereign Landing Zone (SLZ) experience for users. We closely align the SLZ with the Azure Landing Zone (ALZ) to extend the usability of SLZ controls, increase reliance on Azure built-in policies, and expand the infrastructure configuration options. We'll also introduce the first version of SLZ in Terraform.

We're releasing several new policy initiatives to our existing portfolio library. Customers can use these policies to customize deployments according to established regulatory compliance frameworks and government requirements. Besides Azure's built-in policies, customers have access to the updated Sovereignty Baseline Policy initiative and additional country-specific and regulation-specific policy sets.

Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty 2024 release wave 2

Investment areas

Compliance and transparency

Governments and regulated industries need to secure and protect their data and keep innovating while meeting their legislative or regulatory obligations. They also need more insights into the cloud operator's activities.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty builds on the compliance and transparency capabilities that Microsoft already offers. Eligible customers can also take advantage of increased transparency over – and into – their environment's operations with tools and programs such as source code review, access to technical data, and transparency reports.

For qualified customers and government agencies, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty provides additional transparency into Microsoft activities through transparency logs. Additionally, eligible government agencies can take advantage of the Government Security Program.

To learn more about all the capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty below: