Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty in 2025 release wave 1
Important
The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2025 to September 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty.
Overview
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is designed to assist the public sector and regulated industry customers build and digitally transform workloads in the Microsoft Cloud while meeting their specific compliance, security, and policy requirements. Cloud for Sovereignty provides guardrails, policy, tooling, and automation to establish the extra protection that heavily regulated organizations require. Furthermore, it simplifies, standardizes, and improves confidence in the digital sovereignty of workloads in the Microsoft hyperscale public cloud. Cloud for Sovereignty also capitalizes on strong hardware-based confidentiality, encryption controls, and data residency options available in Microsoft Azure.
We're pleased to announce several new features we are releasing as part of 2025 release wave 1. We continue to improve the Sovereign Landing Zone (SLZ) for customers, providing more configurability. We closely align the SLZ with the Azure Landing Zone (ALZ) to extend the usability of SLZ controls, increase reliance on Azure built-in policies, and expand the infrastructure configuration options. We'll also see SLZ on Terraform move from public preview to become general availability.
We're releasing several new policy initiatives to augment our existing portfolio library. Customers can use these policies to help customize deployments in accordance with established regulatory compliance frameworks and government requirements. In addition to Azure's built-in policies, customers have access to the updated Sovereignty Baseline Policy initiative and additional country-specific and regulation-specific policy sets.
For more information, go to Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation.
Investment areas
Compliance and transparency
Governments and regulated industries require confidence in the security and privacy of their data and the ability to keep innovating while protecting that data. They must also be able to meet their legislative or regulatory obligations and have more insights into the cloud operator's activities. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty builds on top of the compliance and transparency capabilities that Microsoft already provides.
The policy portfolio includes regulatory policy initiatives (Azure policy sets) with mappings specific to a given country, region or regulatory framework. Eligible customers can also take advantage of increased transparency over – and into – their environment's operations with tools and programs such as source code review, access to technical data, and transparency reports. For qualified customers and government agencies, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty provides additional transparency into Microsoft activities through transparency logs. Additionally, eligible government agencies can take advantage of the Government Security Program.
Sovereign guardrails and guidance
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty provides access to codified architectures, workload templates, and tooling to accelerate the creation of compliant environments that meet sovereignty, privacy, and regulatory requirements. Additionally, Cloud for Sovereignty reduces the complexity of cloud implementations by providing capabilities that make the process simpler, predictable, and repeatable by design.
Cloud for Sovereignty capabilities capitalize on existing concepts and services such as Infrastructure-as-Code, Azure Policy, and Policy-as-Code. The capabilities are:
- The Sovereign Landing Zone (SLZ), a variant of the Azure landing zone that focuses on digital sovereignty (data residency, confidential computing, and more customer control over data) and is available in Bicep and Terraform.
- The Sovereignty Baseline policy initiatives, which set sovereign guardrails like data residency and data confidentiality.
- The workload templates, which speed up the deployment of Azure workloads that are compatible with the SLZ policies by design.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty below: