France is increasingly focusing on data sovereignty in order to strengthen its digital economy. Just a few weeks after Capgemini and Orange announced their Cloud de Confiance, another Trusted Cloud initiative has been launched. In this case, Thales is launching a new company - S3NS - that will provide French-owned and French-operated cloud services.

Thales provides products and services in areas such as defense, cybersecurity, transportation and space. S3NS was launched in partnership with Google. In October 2021, Thales and Google Cloud announced a partnership to jointly develop a locally-compliant Trusted Cloud offering that will be majority owned and controlled by Thales. Thales and Google aim to help companies and public institutions innovate and accelerate their digital transformation. This is done in ways that preserve French autonomy and respect French sovereignty.

As of 2024, S3NS will offer its "trusted cloud" offering, which will combine all the functionality, services and applications of Google Cloud, while providing protection from extraterritorial foreign laws, in compliance with the requirements of France's Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI), as part of the French State strategy. In order to ensure data and workload localization in France, S3NS will operate three data centers. These data centers will be available later this year. ​

S3NS is finalizing specific partnership agreements with various players in France's growing digital ecosystem in order to best support customers during this transition to the "Trusted Cloud". Using S3NS' and other managed services, partners can support S3NS customers as they migrate and operate their workloads and applications securely.

Photo credit: Thales Alenia Space