Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The compliance question isn't "are we using a private cloud?" Rather, it’s "does our private cloud actually do what compliance requires?" Private cloud has a reputation for solving compliance problems that it doesn't always deserve. The logic seems straightforward: keep data off shared public infrastructure, maintain more direct control, and satisfy the auditors.

The 14 Cloud Security Principles from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre form the primary framework for UK public sector cloud procurement and, increasingly, for private sector regulated workloads. Any credible cloud security case in the UK context has to address these principles explicitly. For organizations placing workloads on sovereign cloud specifically, the mapping matters more than for general cloud procurement.

Healthcare data sits at the top of the sensitivity hierarchy. Patient records are personal data under UK GDPR. Medical records are separately regulated under sector-specific frameworks. Clinical research data may be subject to research-specific rules. Genomics data carries residency implications that go beyond standard personal data protections. NHS data specifically is governed by frameworks that add UK public sector expectations on top of the healthcare-specific ones.

Disaster recovery (DR) is one area where organizations often assume public cloud has the answer already. Multi-region deployments, managed backup services, automated failover - the hyperscaler catalog is full of DR-flavored offerings, and the marketing suggests that resilience is a solved problem once you're on cloud infrastructure. For many workloads, this is roughly true.

Indian fintech operates under one of the most specific data localization regimes in the world. The Reserve Bank of India has published progressive guidance since 2018 requiring payment system data to be stored in India, with subsequent extensions to other categories of financial data. The rules aren't optional. For fintechs operating in India - whether payment providers, lending platforms, wealth managers, or neo-banks - the localization requirements shape fundamental infrastructure choices.

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, passed in 2023 and enforced through subsequent rules, has reshaped the landscape for data hosting decisions for anyone processing personal data of Indian residents. The Act creates specific obligations that map directly onto infrastructure choices: where data can be stored, how consent has to be managed, what security measures are required, and what happens if things go wrong.

GPU cloud security tends to get discussed as if it's the same problem as general cloud security. It isn't. GPUs sit between processes in ways CPUs don't. Training data passes through them in patterns that create specific exposure. Model weights derived from sensitive data are themselves sensitive material in ways most procurement processes don't recognize. And the multi-tenant nature of public GPU cloud creates failure modes that don't exist in CPU-only environments.

The GPU cloud conversation over the last three years has been almost entirely captured by AI. Marketing pages talk about training, inference, and foundation models. Vendor announcements focus on which NVIDIA card fits which LLM. Reference customers are AI companies. The infrastructure decisions being made in the market are shaped by AI's specific requirements - high VRAM, fast interconnect, FP8 support, continuous utilization patterns.