"Data sovereignty is a privacy protection pillar. ThinkOn and Intel are helping managed service providers (MSPs), businesses, and government organizations to protect data and comply with privacy regulations.

The value of data is continually increasing for businesses, which generate more and more data every second. At the same time, the lifecycle of data is being extended. Too often, companies aren’t immediately aware that data has been stolen, and issues are compounded when that stolen data ends up in the hands of people outside of the local jurisdictional control and regulatory frameworks.

The challenge is to ensure data is not only protected, but that it is handled in accordance with regional law and local privacy regulations, while remaining within the control of a business. Risks increase when that data is stored and accessed on server infrastructure beyond national borders or on infrastructure managed by foreign parties.

A multi-layered approach that includes data sovereignty is the key to safeguarding data. MSPs and IT leaders should discuss data sovereignty whether the company is a public sector-facing organization or not. The protection offered by sovereign cloud solutions is far-reaching and helps to give companies greater control over their data and how it is used.

MSPs and IT leaders can help businesses take a more strategic approach to their data and storage requirements, especially with the pervasiveness of cloud computing. This means understanding and helping to explain the risks associated with how and where data is stored.

VMware named ThinkOn to its Sovereign Cloud Initiative, which helps customers engage with trusted national cloud service providers to meet geo-specific requirements around data sovereignty and jurisdictional control, access and integrity, security and compliance, independence and mobility, analytics, and innovation.

ThinkOn has exclusively been using Intel processors from the outset, because they feel Intel technology-based hardware provides an important foundation with flexibility and security. The 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform is optimized for cloud environments. It offers a balanced architecture with built-in acceleration and advanced security capabilities that support most in-demand workloads and a range of XaaS solutions.

ThinkOn has also tapped Intel to help manage storage for its customers’ growing volumes of data with Intel® Optane™ technology. Memory is becoming a very important part of ThinkOn’s business and their customers’ business. Intel Optane technology delivers the ability to offer very large, high-performing databases. Intel Optane technology also establishes new tiers in the memory and storage hierarchy, providing persistent memory, volatile memory, and persistent storage in multiple form factors. Intel Optane SSDs and NAND SSDs extend storage performance and capacity, consolidate storage resources, and boost virtual machine (VM) density.

With an eye towards constantly pushing the possibilities for computing and security, Intel and ThinkOn are collaborating to build the world’s first, fully homomorphic encrypted data repository, using the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8380 processor with Intel® Crypto Acceleration, built-in artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration, and Intel® Software Guard Extensions, as well as Intel® Optane™ SSDs. This environment will use the Intel® Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit and Intel® Homomorphic Encryption Acceleration Library."