A sovereign cloud is a cloud environment where your data is stored in the UK, governed by UK law and administered by people under UK control. All three need to be true, because a UK data centre on its own only covers where the data sits.

Data residency describes where your data is physically stored, while data sovereignty describes whose laws govern it and who can access it. Data held in a UK data centre run by an overseas-owned provider has UK residency, but it may still be subject to that provider’s home jurisdiction.

Private cloud describes who the infrastructure is dedicated to, while sovereign cloud describes who has legal and operational control over it. A private cloud can still be run by a provider subject to foreign law, so being private doesn’t make an environment sovereign.

It can. The CLOUD Act allows US authorities to require US-based providers to hand over data in their possession or control, regardless of where it’s stored, so UK data held by a provider with a US parent company may fall within its scope. Keeping encryption keys under your own control in the UK reduces that risk, and hosting with a UK-owned provider with no US parent avoids it.

To a high degree, yes. Environments on the major hyperscalers can be geo-locked to UK regions, with administrative access restricted and encryption keys held by you rather than the provider. What configuration can’t fully remove is the provider’s US parent company, which leaves a residual risk of support from non-UK personnel and exposure to the US CLOUD Act. Where workloads need to be fully sovereign, managed UK hosting removes both.

That depends on your requirements. Where a high level of sovereignty is enough, we can deploy and manage your environment in UK regions of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. Where workloads need to be fully sovereign, they’re hosted in UK data centres owned and operated by a UK company, with no foreign jurisdiction and no non-UK access.