Capgemini and Orange intend to establish a new company in France, with the aim to provide sovereign cloud services compliant with the new 'Cloud de Confiance' (Trusted Cloud) certification, recently unveiled by the French government. Named Bleu, the company will rely on the expertise of its two majority investors to meet the needs of critical infrastructure organisations and public entities, such as hospitals and local authorities. The 'Cloud de Confiance' certification is an evolution of the SecNumCloud qualification process managed by French IT security agency ANSSI.
Bleu will provide clients with Microsoft software offerings (Azure and Microsoft 365) delivered in a secure and sovereign environment, using data centres located in France that will be independent from Microsoft's global data centre infrastructure.
Bleu plans to join the Gaia-X initiative, in which Orange and Capgemini are both members, and could also integrate more complementary partners in the future.
Commenting on the collaboration, Microsoft said that it was committed to support France in bringing its national cloud strategy to life. This is in line with its "EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud" plan unveiled earlier this month, which will enable Microsoft clients to store and process their sensitive data in the EU/European Economic Area by the end of 2022.
