Microsoft expanded its sovereign cloud offerings with new security, governance, and AI capabilities as customers, especially in Europe, seek more control over data location, access, and continuity. A Sovereign Control Panel in the Azure portal will let organizations assess sovereignty posture, apply controls, and evaluate workload portability; it is scheduled for public preview at Microsoft Ignite. External key management with Azure Managed HSM is generally available so customers can keep root encryption keys in hardware they own or with a trusted third party. Azure Confidential Clean Rooms is in limited preview for sensitive-data collaboration under confidential computing. Azure Local is gaining public-preview transitions between connected and disconnected states, plus DocumentDB and Blob Storage; SQL Server on Azure Local is already generally available. Foundry Local is set to become generally available at Ignite for local inference and agentic retrieval on Azure Local.
Microsoft expanded its sovereign cloud offerings with new security, governance, and AI capabilities as customers, especially in Europe, seek more control over data location, access, and continuity. A Sovereign Control Panel in the Azure portal will let organizations assess sovereignty posture, apply controls, and evaluate workload portability; it is scheduled for public preview at Microsoft Ignite. External key management with Azure Managed HSM is generally available so customers can keep root encryption keys in hardware they own or with a trusted third party. Azure Confidential Clean Rooms is in limited preview for sensitive-data collaboration under confidential computing. Azure Local is gaining public-preview transitions between connected and disconnected states, plus DocumentDB and Blob Storage; SQL Server on Azure Local is already generally available. Foundry Local is set to become generally available at Ignite for local inference and agentic retrieval on Azure Local.