What is the CLOUD Act?

The CLOUD Act or the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, was enacted in the United States in 2018. Its primary purpose is to provide law enforcement agencies with enhanced access to electronic data held by American technology companies. Even if the data is stored outside the United States. The CLOUD Act also enables reciprocal data-sharing agreements between the U.S. and other foreign governments. While the CLOUD Act has implications for data stored in the cloud, it primarily affects cloud providers subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

What are the Implications for our Partners’ Customers in terms of Privacy and Data Security?

1. Access to Data: Under the CLOUD Act, U.S. law enforcement agencies can compel cloud providers to disclose customer data, regardless of its physical location. As a Managed Service Provider or Reseller, this would mean that even if your client’s data is stored in a server outside the U.S., it may still be subject to access by U.S. authorities if your cloud provider is subject to the CLOUD Act. This raises concerns about potential infringement on individual privacy rights and the ability to maintain control over personal and sensitive information.

2. Data Security: When your client’s data, or yours for that matter, is stored with a cloud provider bound by the CLOUD Act, it is subject to additional risks in terms of security. The CLOUD Act requires cloud providers to provide access to data, potentially introducing vulnerabilities that malicious actors could exploit. This highlights the importance of robust security measures to protect data stored in the cloud, including encryption, access controls, and regular audits of the provider’s security practices.

3. International Data Protection: The CLOUD Act’s provisions for international data-sharing agreements raise questions about how data is protected and governed in different jurisdictions. Data stored with a cloud provider bound by the CLOUD Act may be subject to different legal standards and regulations, depending on the country involved. This can complicate compliance with data protection laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which imposes stringent requirements on the handling of personal data.

How can you Mitigate this Risk for your Clients?

As a Reseller, System Integrator, Managed Service Provider or adviser, your client’s data and its security is at heart of your offering. The responsible choosing of a cloud provider is therefore imperative in order to reduce this risk. More concretely, you do it by choosing cloud providers that are transparent about their data handling practices, by assessing their jurisdiction and by understanding the legal frameworks they operate under.

At OVHcloud in Europe, we are CLOUD Act free.

Full Compliance with European Regulations, Freedoms and Fundamental Right

Organizationally, the OVHcloud Group is a European group in which European commercial entities fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of European Union member states, or states that have been subject to a European Commission adequacy decision. These entities are controlled by OVH Groupe, a company governed by French law, with no dependency links to any entity or organisation subject to the jurisdiction of states that do not provide an adequate level of data protection.

Requests from non-EU authorities (governmental, administrative, judicial or other) may be made for the communication of a European user’s data hosted in a datacenter located within the European Union. In this case, OVHcloud systematically opposes to such requests. In accordance with EU regulations; this is the  this is the case for example when they are not carried out in accordance with an international agreement — such as a treaty on mutual legal assistance in force between the requesting country and the Member State(s) of the European Union concerned.

Compliant with the Strictest Security Standards

The SecNumCloud Security Visa, obtained by OVHcloud in early 2021, plus the renewed SecNumCloud 3.2 gained in 2023 to accelerate OVHcloud strategy on its datacenters, give certified cloud service customers the assurance that they will choose solutions with a security and trust level verified by ANSSI (the French National Agency for Information Systems Security).  OVHcloud also obtained security labels in other countries (for example G-cloud in the UK and AgiD in Italy), and provides its cloud services to the administrations of several European Union state members, as well as European Commission institutions.

As the use of cloud storage becomes increasingly prevalent, it is vital to understand the implications of entrusting your customer’s data to cloud providers subject to the CLOUD Act. Balancing the benefits of cloud computing with the potential risks to privacy and data security requires informed decision-making and proactive measures. At OVHcloud, the data protection of our clients and of our partner’s clients is the core of our operation. By choosing providers wisely, implementing robust security measures, and staying vigilant about data protection, clients and partners can navigate the cloud landscape while safeguarding their information in the face of evolving legal frameworks.

Get to know more about how Data Sovereignty and Trusted Cloud is critical for business: https://blog.ovhcloud.com/data-sovereignty-trusted-cloud-critical-business/

It takes more than a good business idea to create a successful business. According to the British Business Bank, the biggest challenges for startups include lack of demand, ineffective marketing, a gap in skills, securing funding, financial management, hiring the right people and time management.

By joining a business ecosystem — like the OVHcloud Startup Program — startups can access a network of people and organisations that can provide the support, expertise and advice to give your business the best possible chance of success.

Since its creation in 2015, the OVHcloud Startup Program has helped more than 2,000 companies, by increasing their visibility to investors and giving them access to other organisations — as well as providing access to technology that could add value.

OVHcloud recently spoke to four people involved in the Startup Program to find out why being part of an ecosystem can be so invaluable.

The connector’s view

Sydney-based French expat Leo Denes is the founder of Australiance and co-founder of Startup&Angels, which between them help startups enter the Australian market, recruit talent, grow their business and meet rights partners/investors.

Speaking about the role connectors play in startup ecosystems, Denes says: “It’s quite magical, because you can really create value for a startup founder by just doing an introduction. The right introduction can lead to solving a huge challenge or create massive opportunities.”

Areas in which connectors can help include business development, capital raising, finding the right talent, and developing partnerships to encourage business growth. They can also share knowledge to help founders make the right decisions for their business.

With their knowledge of the Australian market, Denes and his team help tech companies from Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US to understand the market, develop a go-to-market strategy, set up Australian entities, and secure their first clients. Startup&Angels also helps startups increase their brand awareness through events, podcasts and social media.

Ecosystems as a game changer

For Alex Hernandez, a French entrepreneur now based in Madrid, the opportunities provided by a business ecosystem like that offered by OVHcloud are the reason his business exists.

“For me the power of ecosystem had been game changing in my life and I wouldn’t be here today without it,” says Hernandez.

As co-founder and sales director of alternative recruitment company, JobGether, Hernandez launched the business in July 2020 after finding a business partner via membership of the French Founders business network.

“The power of ecosystem was the start of my entrepreneurial journey,” says Hernandez, who subsequently joined the OVHcloud ecosystem. Through this, he met companies that became clients and partners.

“When you start a startup for the first time, you have no clue of what’s going to happen. By joining an ecosystem you can learn a lot, try to avoid mistakes others have made, share experiences, grow your network very quickly, and find clients,” Hernandez says.

Saving time

For Bordeaux-based Rita Nazarian, partnership manager at digital invoice collection provider iPaidThat, the OVHcloud ecosystem provided a quicker and easier way to increase the company’s visibility and valuation.

“It’s less time consuming, I can find the appropriate partners and I can easily check who is interested in our technology,” says Nazarian.

JobGether’s Alex Hernandez agreed that time saving is a major benefit of ecosystem membership: “When you set up a startup you wish there were 50 hours in a day because you have so many things to do. Building a network on your own will take a lot of time – by joining an ecosystem you will save a lot of this precious time.”

Startups can be directly linked to the people and organisations they need, rather than hoping to find the right person or organisation by trawling through online networks like LinkedIn.

Saving businesses

For UK-based Yigit Erol, founder and CEO of Fidsy, which provides AI-powered conversational BI, the connections he was able to make through the OVHcloud ecosystem was a major factor in his business surviving during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As a founder you take a leap into the unknown and it’s a long journey with hurdles along the way,” he says.

Starting the company in November 2019, Erol had four investors agreed in principle. However during the first few months of lockdown, all of the investors pulled out, leaving Erol searching for new ways to fund the business.

Once he joined the OVHcloud ecosystem community, he instantly felt supported. “It was almost like holding hands together through this difficult journey,” he says.

Erol was introduced to the community, took part in a few panels and received advice on how he could keep his business afloat. In the end, he didn’t have to give away any equity in his business and now has a product and customers to sell to, with no need to report to investors.

The ecosystem that OVHcloud has created with its Startup Program is crucial to the businesses that are members. And ultimately, it’s the connections that the ecosystem enables that offer the most powerful reason for companies to become involved.

To find out how your business can benefit from the power of the ecosystem,
visit our Startup Program homepage

During this international event (Europe, Americas, Asia-Pacific), more than 50 sessions were led by users, contributors, experts and partners, who shared their testimonials and feedback. Each day was opened with highlight speeches from Michel Paulin, CEO of OVHcloud, and Octave Klaba, Founder and Chairman of OVHcloud — who brought a number of guests to the virtual stage.

With a recent €350 million capital injection Pairs and a market capitalization of nearly €4 billion following an initial public offering (IPO) on the regulated market of Euronext, OVHcloud is entering a new phase of its expansion. Almost a month later, the Ecosystem Experience presented an opportunity to make joint announcements.

Accelerating the development of new, value-based cloud solutions

To meet a wide range of customer needs — including digital native companies, public and private organisations, DevOps, and reseller and integrator partners — OVHcloud continues to develop its four product categories: Bare Metal Cloud, Hosted Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Web Cloud. It is expanding these categories through Artificial Intelligence solutions, DBaaS tools, application platforms, storage, backup and orchestration services. These solutions are always offered at a predictable price, and with a performance/cost ratio that is unique on the market — so that our customers can maintain total control over their cloud strategy.

To support companies’ digital transformation by offering a set of ready-to-use tools, OVHcloud is accelerating the integration of software technologies into its solution portfolio by combining its long-standing expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. It is achieving this through:

• Partnerships such as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solutions with MongoDB and Aiven, to offer open-source or non-open-source managed database solutions (MongoDB clusters, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis and Apache Kafka, as well as Elasticsearch, M3 and Apache Cassandra in their beta-testing versions) — and the collaborative web development platform with Platform.sh).
• Its own R&D (with AI Notebooks that developers and data scientists can test out for free – and AI Training, for example, disruptive AI PaaS solutions, and soon an AI Studio with solutions for processing images, speech and text — to facilitate the adoption of AI technology in most companies).
• Acquisitions of technological building blocks (with the upcoming launch of a High Performance Object Storage solution following the acquisition of OpenIO, currently in its beta-testing phase) and soon, a High Performance Block Storage solution with the acquisition of Exten Technologies).

OVHcloud guarantees its customers data sovereignty by enabling them to choose the location of their data, protect them from outside interference, and ensure compliance with local regulations. It also upholds its promise not to exploit this data to optimise its AI models, or for commercial purposes. This commitment was recently reinforced with the advent of Hosted Private Cloud solutions qualified as SecNumCloud (ANSSI Security Visa), which reflects their compliance with the highest security and trust standard in Europe. This is also demonstrated by the G-Cloud compliance in the UK, C5 in Germany — and AGID in Italy — obtained by OVHcloud to address the public sector market across Europe.

Furthermore, this promise is reflected in the Hosted Private Cloud powered by Anthos solution — Google Anthos’s sovereign version of the solution, which was recently launched and guarantees dedicated private cloud and total isolation with Google Cloud.

Soon OVHcloud will be adding similar solutions to its portfolio with Nutanix, available now in Beta.

OVHcloud achieved SAP® Certification for cloud and Infrastructure Operations and launched in October the first offer for hosting your SAP environments in a trusted cloud based on our High-Grade Bare Metal. OVHcloud will be complete similar solutions to its portfolio with a second SAP offer now in Beta.

The next step for OVHcloud is to ensure its customers’ technological  sovereignty, by enabling them to control the underlying technology and avoid vendor lock-in situations. Its Public Cloud, for example, is based on OpenStack. To go even further, OVHcloud will offer a platform of open cloud solutions, allowing PaaS to be shared with all players who are waiting for more standards, openness and reversibility — and who can both use and enhance them. OVHcloud solutions are designed for interoperability and reversibility, in line with recommendations from GAIA-X. Pierre Gronlier, CTO of GAIA-X, also shed light on the recent progress of this initiative to implement a decentralised, open and sovereign data infrastructure.

A number of OVHcloud partners gave their testimonials on these strategic topics — including Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware, Rob Bissett, Product Manager at Google Cloud, and Vincent Robert, Partner Project Manager at Platform.sh.

Getting closer to international customers, in compliance with local legislations

To serve its communities around the world, OVHcloud is broadening its global presence by expanding existing datacentres (particularly in Europe and Canada), and opening sites in new regions (e.g. the US, India, the Asia-Pacific region), while guaranteeing its customers operational sovereignty, since they retain the freedom to choose where their data is stored.

So for large companies that must respond to strategic and economic sovereignty issues, whether they are local or European, OVHcloud is now delivering its services in volume — from 3 to several racks, to Datacentre-as-a-Service — allowing its customers to define how their Cloud is operational and deployed.

Furthermore, all OVHcloud solutions are compliant with currently applicable legislations, depending on the sector or location: GDPR for personal data, for example, and HDS for healthcare data. Among others, Raphaël-David Lasseri — Founder and CEO of Magic Lemp — delivered a solid reminder about the importance of this compliance during a session dedicated to healthcare data challenges. To illustrate the guarantee of data immunity from extraterritorial laws, Cristina Guttuso — Chief Legal Officer of OVHcloud — hosted a conference on the new framework for European data transfers.

Finally, although its datacentres are already compliant with regulations, OVHcloud is announcing the creation of a new resilience standard for datacentres that will soon be shared more widely. It is currently being used for the construction of its new datacentres, and reviewed for upgrades to its existing datacentres. OVHcloud is also exploring solutions that will enable it to provide customers with regular backups in a datacentre that is remote from most services.

Offering support programs for collective success

In order to support its growing ecosystem, OVHcloud is continuing to strengthen and deploy its support programs on an international level. These include the Partner Program, Startup Program, Marketplace and Open Trusted Cloud, which are based on non-exclusive engagements. Among many others, Mariana Caillaud, Founder and CEO of Dolipharm, Rita Nazarian, Partnership Manager of IPaidThat, and Roberto Correnti, CTO of Full IP Solutions, shared their feedback on the benefits of these programs.

Pursuing a comprehensive innovation policy geared towards sustainability

As an integral part of its DNA, OVHcloud’s vertical model is essential for sustainable innovation. The company is paving the way towards an eco-friendly cloud through its own R&D and collaboration with providers (to aim for a transparent carbon footprint of server components), cloud market players (notably through a common commitment in the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact), and customers (it will soon be providing a carbon footprint calculator for their cloud resource usage).

To achieve its goal of zero net emissions by 2030 — and anticipate new use cases that require very high performance — OVHcloud is now testing an immersion cooling prototype. This is a unique concept, as it involves combining immersion-cooling and water-cooling technology, which OVHcloud has been developing for the last 18 years.

Thomas Arenz, Director of Marketing Communications and Strategic Business Development for EMEA at Samsung, Thibaut de La Bouverie, Partner, Cloud Transformation Lead at Deloitte and Romain Rouvoy, Professor at INRIA, also spoke about the environmental challenges of the cloud at a dedicated conference.

Learn more about the Ecosystem Experience 2021.

Between two major online events, JupyterCon and PyData – both sponsored by OVHcloud – I wanted to share my team’s feedback on our collaboration with Project Jupyter. The partnership, which begun a few years back, is still growing and we are continuing to learn a lot in relation to the open-source experience. 

I’d like to introduce Maël Le Gal, one of our Data & AI DevOps for almost three years. In 2019, Maël was heavily invested in making OVHcloud one of the hosters of Binder Hubs.  

“Joining the multi-cloud Binder Federation and becoming an infrastructure provider of MyBinder.org was a thrilling project! I experienced open collaboration on a new scale. Typically, all the discussions regarding architecture evolution are held publicly within the Binder community on GitHub and additional day-to-day communications – such as operational tasks – are held collectively on Gitter. It’s a very different approach to building a trusting relationships than what we are accustomed to in the IT industry, and I really appreciate it!” , explained Maël.

In hindsight, it was a unique, co-innovation opportunity for OVHcloud to become the first partner of the Binder Federation, and it became even more interesting when the two other partners – Gesis and Turing – joined as well. Thanks to our collaborative methods, we can easily and collectively submit a new feature; once most of the community agrees on the feature, we deploy it on each of the three clouds. 

Maël Le Gal, Data & AI DeVops with OVHcloud, explains the daily collaboration of the Binder Federation.

This is what I wrote about my experience with MyBinder last year: “Working with open source requires a very human-centric mindset to build consensus and deliver progress when everyone has different objectives, priorities, timelines and points of view.” 

2020: scaling projects and accelerating 

Building on this experience, Maël contributed to another hosting initiative for Project Jupyter earlier this year that quickly scaled: NBViewer – the web application behind The Jupyter Notebook Viewer, hosted by OVHcloud.  

“Jupyter was quite happy about our first collaboration and, in March, asked us to replace a previous hosting provider that had disengaged from the open-source community. Because we already had the deployment experience, and methods from Binder, it was a very smooth deployment. We were happy to see that the traffic running on the OVHcloud infrastructure grew from 25% to 100%”, explained Maël. 

Now I’d like to introduce another member of my team: Guillaume Salou, our AI Technical Lead, who’s been working closely with Project Jupyter from the beginning and driving the OVHcloud sponsorhip of the JupyterCon 2020 digital event as an infrastructure donor.  

“We kicked off this project in June with Project Jupyter and NumFOCUS Foundation as well as IBL Education, responsible for the Open EDX deployment at the conference. OVHcloud has offered the underlying infrastructure to host the global event (for the first time fully online) and its educational platform and now we had to deploy it!

The type of infrastructure we’re talking about is, of course, GPUs, coupled with Kubernetes to support all the talks, demos and online experiments that were planned.  

I want to highlight three aspects of this infrastructure that meet Project Jupyter’s requirements: 

• Ability to scale up and down as necessary; 

• Ability to load balance on other cloud providers and the reversibility of our services; 
• Simplified rights management and user account creation based on Openstack.“

This collaboration has steered our efforts towards simplifying features and providing ready-to-use services for the event’s organizers and users; it’s a new milestone in OVHcloud’s AI approach to eliminate all infrastructure set-up and management complexity to facilitate and spread usages.

Guillaume Salou, AI Technical Lead with OVHcloud explains how the collaboration on JupyterCon 2020 has supported internal efforts to simplify the user experience.

To conclude: this partnership with Project Jupyter is here to stay. Thanks a lot to our partner as well as internal teams for making this open and fruitful collaboration a reality!

Let’s keep the momentum going to create even more trusted solutions together! You can continue to share your sovereign products or solutions with the hashtag #WeAreChangemakers. Together, we can consolidate this strong ecosystem, united by a common foundation of European values.

For all of us, 2020 was a year of unprecedented challenges. OVHcloud has chosen to unite its ecosystem by transforming its historic physical event, the OVHcloud Summit, into a 3-day virtual event that included prestigious guests and international testimonials. Many contributors from different countries accepted this huge challenge with us. And despite the increasingly complicated conditions due to the evolving healthcare crisis, they demonstrated an unwavering commitment based on our shared values and the ideas we all wanted to defend around freedom and digital sovereignty.

If you were unable to attend the keynotes or the many sessions, led jointly by our experts and those from our partner or customer ecosystem, the 3-day replay is now available.

We hope you will enjoy this event as much as we enjoyed organising it!

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of our sponsors, and to the ecosystem of partners who contributed to the event: Appcraft, Vodalys, Mediawen, Uzik.

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As you probably know, Jupyter has been a huge enabler of the programming community, with over 140 Kernels supported such as Python, R, Julia, Spark, Sas, Haskell, Ruby, C++, Go, etc…

The Jupyter Project embodies open and collaborative dev communities, both key values in the makeup of our own ecosystem.

In recent years, Jupyter and OVHcloud have worked hand in hand on projects such as Mybinder.org and NbViewer. I would like to thank the Jupyter board and NumFocus for their openness and trust, which has enabled such a successful partnership.

In 2020, we moved further, offering a full year of support for the JupiterCon and helping to contribute to the event’s success.

With the transition to a fully digital experience, COVID-19 travel restrictions are an opportunity not only to reduce travel costs and ease accessibility, but to limit the carbon footprint tied to knowledge sharing within the ecosystem.