Thales retries the adventure of the cloud of trust with Google Cloud

“We are once again becoming a player in the public cloud”, indicates Marc Darmon, deputy general manager of the information and secure communications system activity at Thales, in the preamble to the announcement of the partnership with Google Cloud for the creation of a cloud of confidence. It must be said that the security actor has a long history in this field having participated in the Andromède project with the Cloudwatt fork. Despite this failure, Thales is therefore back in the adventure of the cloud of trust by relying on Google Cloud to attract private companies, but also administrations.

Concretely, Thales will create a company under French law, “which will be majority owned and completely controlled by us”, slips Marc Darmon during a press conference. Google Cloud will also be a shareholder in this structure, but without controlling power. The investment is considered “very important” by both parties, but without giving figures and will be the subject of several recruitments. The objective of this company is to escape the extraterritorial effects of certain regulations such as the Cloud Act. This structure, which has no name for the moment, will be created at the beginning of the year 2022. A date which corresponds to the inauguration of the three data centers of Google Cloud in the Paris region (to answer the question of the triangulation) and which will accommodate the infrastructures of the future society. “There will be a physical separation with company employees, a technical separation with our own servers and our own network,” explains Marc Darmon. It adds a third separation on the software aspect with the establishment of a security airlock for functional and security updates of services “in order to verify their integrity”.

Workspace still under discussion

The next company will apply for the trusted Cloud label (an extension of SecNumCloud) from Anssi. It is expected to be obtained in the course of next year and the first offers will be marketed at the end of 2022. Exactly, will this company provide all of Google Cloud’s offers. “Our desire is to offer a maximum of services ranging from computing resources, storage, databases, but also artificial intelligence”, specifies Anthony Cirot, CEO of Google Cloud France.

However, there are still topics still under discussion, for example on the collaborative Workspace suite, which is not yet part of the solutions package offered. In addition, the issue of reporting data to enrich AI algorithm models is under debate. The support will be provided by the new company, without however offering a guarantee in time as is the case for the competitor Bleu avec Bleu carried by Orange, Capgemini and Microsoft (support and ISO functions of 10 + 10 years for Azure ). But Marc Darmon assures us “this is a long-term partnership”.

Competition in the cloud trust

Asked about the differentiating aspects with the competition from Bleu, Thales highlights its expertise in security and in particular in encryption. Google Cloud is pushing its catalog of services “well positioned to manage large volumes of data in particular”, emphasizes Anthony Cirot. This agreement also competes with the partnership between OVH and Google Cloud announced almost a year ago based on the Hosted Private Cloud offer from the Roubaix supplier and Anthos from the American firm. We can add in this panorama, the merger between OVH and Atos to see that the year 2022 promises to be particularly dynamic in the trusted cloud market. One question remains: AWS which, for the moment, has not reached an agreement.

In any case, the announcement of Thales and Google Cloud was well received by the authorities and by companies. Minister Bruno Lemaire sees it as a translation of the cloud strategy designed by the State. For Cigref, this partnership is considered as “a relevant response to the need for trust”.