Private Cloud Access Part 1 – a Key to Data Sovereignty

Businesses are increasingly relying on hybrid cloud architectures, spreading their workloads, data, and resources across both public and private cloud environments. This shift trend is driving an unprecedented surge of enterprise data traveling across wide area networks (WANs), far beyond the confines of traditional on-premises data centers and local area networks (LANs).

Data now travels across the WAN for a wide array of purposes. Here are a few examples:

• Enterprise applications often require bursts of remote compute power to handle peak workloads or complex processing tasks.
• AI increasingly depends on distributed and federated compute systems, where training datasets and model computations are spread across multiple locations to maximize efficiency and performance.
• Language models are leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques, tapping into external knowledge bases to enhance their outputs.

The movement of As data moves across multiple locations, between private clouds, public cloud services, and remote offices, presents not only technical, but also regulatory challenges. As a result, data sovereignty becomes a critical requirement. Organizations must maintain control over where their data resides, ensuring sensitive information stays within the appropriate jurisdictions and complies with local laws and regulations. Managing data locations, especially across borders, is essential to meet legal obligations and protect customer trust.

Cloud access has benefited from the Internet’s ubiquity and global reach. However, because the Internet is inherently borderless, it cannot guarantee data sovereignty. Once data leaves a local network, it may traverse multiple jurisdictions, creating compliance challenges for sensitive or regulated information.

To address this, many enterprises are turning to private cloud access, which uses managed carrier and hyperscale networks to bypass the public Internet entirely. A common approach is through telco cloud services, strategically located at network edge sites to bring cloud resources closer to the enterprise. These telco clouds provide low-latency, high-performance connectivity and are increasingly being adopted as a reliable, secure foundation for hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.

Private access to public clouds relies on close cooperation between telecom carriers and cloud hyperscalers. This cooperation requires the carriers to provide managed, high-performance connectivity from business sites to the hyperscalers’ co-location facilities, enabling secure, compliant, and predictable access.

There are two popular options to make this possible:

• Direct cloud access – A carrier-managed connection via the hyperscaler’s private network (e.g., AWS-hosted Direct Connect) for seamless access to both private and public cloud services.
• VPN to cloud locations – A customer-managed router in a cloud site that is connected over a L2 or L3 VPN, or L3VPN using the hyperscaler’s dedicated, private connectivity service.

RAD’s Ethernet Access Devices are being used in both these services options.
In part 2 of this blog, we will explore newly introduced value- added services to enhance private business access to public clouds.